ZoomFoundry 6.0.4

A dynamic Web Framework that promotes modularity and rapid prototyping

README

ZoomFoundry is a dynamic Python Web framework written specifically for Python 3 that promotes modularity and rapid prototyping for building and maintaining useful web sites quickly and easily.

Requirements

ZoomFoundry requires Python 3 and MySQL to run, along with a host of other 3rd party library requirements listed in the requirements.txt file. It is currently tested and used on various flavours of GNU/Linux, Mac and Windows.

Getting started with ZoomFoundry

The best way to get started with ZoomFoundry is to try it. By following along with this guide step by step you'll create a simple blog ZoomFoundry app. Before you can start building the app, you need to make sure that you have ZoomFoundry installed.

Installing ZoomFoundry

Open up a terminal window and follow along with the following steps. The dollar sign $ in the following examples is the command prompt.

ZoomFoundry is a Python 3 framework so you'll need to have Python 3 installed to run it. We recommend the latest version which you can download from python.org.

All set? Okay, here we go!

1. Install ZoomFoundry

   $ pip install ZoomFoundry
   

   This will install a new python package called zoom, and a new CLI command also called zoom.

2. Once that is installed create the database using the newly installed zoom command:

   $ zoom database create zoomdata
   

   This assumes you have access to a MySQL server using your default username. See zoom database --help to adjust for your environment.

3. Next, edit the site.ini file for the localhost site using your editor like so:

   $ vi web/sites/localhost/site.ini
   

   Find the database section of the config file and set the values for the database configuration to correspond to your database configuration. Typically:

   [database]
   name=zoomdata
   

4. Run zoom.
   
   If you are currently in the zoom directory then you don't need to tell zoom where to find your zoom instance. Otherwise, you can specify the directory and port.

   $ zoom server -p 8080 ~/work/web
   

Creating the Blog App

First, you'll need a place to build your apps. Make an apps directory and cd into it.

$ mkdir apps && cd apps

To let the zoom command know where to find this apps directory add it to the site.ini file. In your site.ini file, which you'll find in the web/sites/localhost directory look for the path setting in the [apps] section of the and add the path to your apps directory.

Next, let's create the blog app. Start by creating a blog directory in your apps.

$ mkdir blog && cd blog

Now we'll create a very simple hello world app, just to make sure it's all working correctly. Create a file called app.py that contains this:

"""
    zoom app v 0.1
"""

import zoom

def hello(request):
    return zoom.page('Hello, World!', title='Hello!')

Go to your zoom instance (localhost) in your browser and you should see your new app.

This is the most basic app, which basically takes a request object as the sole parameter and returns a response, in this case, a page response.

To do a more advanced app, Zoom provides an App class that handles basic routing, other services, and calls other parts of your app. To use it just create an instance of it in your app.py file, like this:

"""
    zoom app v 0.2
"""

import zoom

app = zoom.App()

Now when you run your app you should get a "Page Not Found" status 404 page. This is happening because we haven't provided any pages for the app. To do that create an index.py file to provided the app content.

With our blog app, we're going to use a Zoom collection. A Zoom collection is a collection of any type of field related data that you would like to store. It provides all the things you would typically expect of a basic data collection app including browsing records, searching, editing and displaying information.

In our case, we'd like to store blog posts. For this example, for each blog entry we'll store a name, a description, the blog post body, and a published date.

We start by defining a function that returns the fields we want to use in our app. We then pass that function to the Collection class which will use the fields to create a collection.

"""
    blog index v 0.1
"""

import zoom
import zoom.fields as f

def blog_fields():
    return f.Fields(
    f.TextField('Name'),
    f.MemoField('Description'),
    f.EditField('Body'),
    f.DateField('Date Published'),
    )

main = zoom.collect.Collection(
    blog_fields,
    url=zoom.system.app.url,
)

Now, when you run your app. You should see a list where you can create blog entries.

Now, let's say, you realized you would like to add an Author field. Just add the field to the list and re-run your app. Like this:

"""
    blog index v 0.1
"""

import zoom
import zoom.fields as f

def blog_fields():
    return f.Fields(
    f.TextField('Name'),
    f.TextField('Author'),
    f.MemoField('Description'),
    f.EditField('Body'),
    f.DateField('Date Published'),
    )

main = zoom.collect.Collection(
    blog_fields,
    url=zoom.system.app.url,
)

Now, run it and try adding some data.

What, what?! Where's the data model step? How do I create my tables?! Where is my data stored? What about migrations?

For now, Zoom will handle all of this for you. Rest assured, your data is being stored in the MySQL database, but it's being stored in an entity store with a dynamic schema so you can add and remove fields from your collection at will and Zoom will just take care of it.

Zoom can use traditional tables as well, of course, but for prototyping and many other types of work a dynamic schema works very well.

That's as far as we'll go with the app right now. In the future we'll provide more of the features people have come to expect from a blog app.

Contributing

To contribute your own code to Zoom you'll need to setup a development environment.

Setting Up The Easy way

The simplest way to hack on Zoom is to use one of our Vagrant boxes or Docker containers.

Setting Up The Hard Way

If you can't use the prepared boxes then the best way to do that is to look at the Dockerfile or Vagrantfile of the boxes and see how those are set up.

Testing

Once your box is setup you can run the tests by switching to the zoom directory and running nosetests.

$ nosetests

This will run the unittests, doctests and sidetests. If your box is not setup for sidetests (which uses webdriver, and various other libraries) you can skip them by specifying only the other directories for tests.

$ nosetests zoom tests/unittests