Anthony, I am going to reply to one specific part of your last post, the one with "I don't think the concept of wrapper application is well defined.":
I don't think the concept of "wrapper application" is well defined. In any case, we should probably drop that idea, as your ultimate goal is not to have a "wrapper application" but instead to have some configuration data made available to your application -- so let's focus on that. I should not be here to defend the usefulness of a wrapper application or even rigorously define it. I believe that the notion of a wrapper is sufficiently general that I should not need to define it. I don't think it would be easy to define it rigorously, anyway. A wrapper function over f is a function that receives some input, does little preparation, calls f, receives the value returned by f and then returns the value, possibly after with some little modifications. It is not a formal definition, because it does not define "little preparation" and "little modifications" and it does not say that the function f must have been adapted to take advantage of the preparation, but we have the idea. This is not a formal paper, so do not expect formal definitions. We can further say that the purpose of a wrapper is to replace the wrapped object, which cannot do the job itself because it needs this little preparation. I think the concept is easy to generalize to an application, to a script, etc. I understand that the normal way to call a web2py application is through an HTTP request, because this is the way a web application is called. I could easily have a wrapper application in web2py. The wrapper application will receive the HTTP request in the same way as the wrapped application would, because this is what we expect from a wrapper. Then, it will do some preparation, in our case, set the location of the configuration file into a post string which it will post to the wrapped application through some internal HTTP request. It will receive the HTML response and return it to the client of the original HTTP request. I don't care and we should not care if we call the wrapped application without an HTTP request, as long as it does the same thing for our purpose. In the case of PHP, we can do that with a simple include of the script that would have been called by the original HTTP request. As in any wrapping process, the wrapped application must be adapted to use the little preparation. I never used this in a PHP framework, but I suspect that it can be done. The wrapper application (in the framework) would simply include the wrapped application (in the same or even a different framework). It could be that the wrapped application must be designed to avoid some pitfalls, but that is OK - it is still possible. I never tried that with a PHP framework, but I don't see any fundamental issue. If you know PHP and see a fundamental problem with this, let me know concretely what it is. My question was do we have the equivalent within web2py, that is, can we wrap an application without having to do an HTTP request? I was not expecting to have to motivate the usefulness of this, but just wanted to know if it is possible. I am not saying that I do not find useful your suggestions how to pass configuration values in web2py, but you forget that I mentioned in the question "never mind this specific use case, because the objective here is very standard and general." The question was directly in terms of the general concept of wrappers. There could be other use cases where these wrappers could be useful. In fact, even for that specific use case, I don't think that any of your suggestion totally replace what a wrapper can do. I would have to analyze each of your suggestion, but most likely, in each case, there will be some things possible with a wrapper that we don't have with the alternative approach. In any case, even if we could always do without it, it does not mean that it will not be nice to have this. I am sorry that you put me on the defensive, but perhaps you are also on the defensive regarding the capabilities of web2py. If I did not think that web2py is great, I would not be here. It was just a question regarding wrappers. Now, if the feeling is that I am trying to prove that web2py is limited and you try to prove that I am wrong, then you will never address the question for what it is. I want to learn the different ways to pass configuration values in web2py and the pros and cons of each methods, but in a different context. Now, the context is wrappers and what is possible in that direction. -- Resources: - http://web2py.com - http://web2py.com/book (Documentation) - http://github.com/web2py/web2py (Source code) - https://code.google.com/p/web2py/issues/list (Report Issues) --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "web2py-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to web2py+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
