Grok the codebase is 2 years old this week. Two years ago we had the
first Grok sprint in Halle, Germany, at the Gocept offices. A lot has
happened since then. For me personally Grok is my development workhorse
now and has been since early 2007. It's something I use during
development every day.
Let's review some of the highlights of whave happened since last year's
birthday.
- Grok has a Plone-based website. This site hopefully looks welcoming to
new users and thanks to the CMS backing it, it allows people to
contribute documentation for Grok easily.
- In addition to the Plone-driven website, Grok has a sphinx driven
documentation website. This allows the developers to maintain
important pieces of documentation in subversion, along with the
codebase.
- Grok now officially works with Python 2.5.
- Grok's technology became usable in non-Grok Zope 3 applications and in
Zope 2 as well, as we split off important functionality into reusable
libraries.
- Some feature highlights since the last year are viewlet support and
ZCML auto-inclusion, as well as eggbasket support for grokproject.
What's currently in the works?
- From what I've seen, Grok's going to really improve the development
experience in the next feature release of the
Silva CMS. A lot of the drive to
port Grok technology to Zope 2 has also come from members of the
Plone community, so I have good hopes that Plone will
benefit from Grok technology as well. I know there is currently a lot of pain
felt by Plone developers - too many ways to do things, and too many files to
edit. I hope Grok technology can be useful to make their lives easier.
- WSGI out-of-the-box support is still in the works, but should be
released very soon now. People have been using Grok with WSGI for a
long time now, but we still need to ship with a story that works
straight away.
- People have been working on improving integration between Grok and the
powerful
z3c.form form generation and handling library.
- We've worked a lot on Grok's integration with SQLAlchemy in the form
of
megrok.rdb. An initial release of this package should be around
the corner.
- We've been reviewing how Grok's view story works in connection with
inheritance, and we have hopes to improve this.
- We've been working on improving Grok's support for the inclusion of
static resources.
I think we should be heading towards a Grok 1.0 release within the next
couple of months. Meanwhile, we're already thinking about larger changes
that can go into Grok afterwards. I think there are quite a few exciting
technologies that should be included in Grok out of the box, and also a
lot of opportunities for engineering Grok's underlying technology to be
even better.
