As our application is growing larger, we're noticing some issues with
coupling and the modularity of apps.
In particular, how plugable are apps supposed to be? It's clear that
at the top level, a project should be able to access all of its
parts, but it seems like it should be the case that each individual
app should be as self-contained as possible, ideally relying only on
its own code and code supplied by django.
But adding an app to a project isn't as simple as just adding it. In
addition to adding it to INSTALLED_APPS, you also have to figure out
if it's self-contained or relies upon other apps. If it's templates
depend on a context_processor having been called, you have to add
that to your project's TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS. Also, an app may
need to know where it's located in the projects URL space so that it
can create links to other parts of itself (at least, if you don't
want a bunch of "../../../lots/of/updirectory.html" kinds of URLs.
So, as I've been thinking about this stuff, I've been wondering if
some of this could be made less piecemeal and more systematic.
Here are some thoughts, which are pretty raw, but I'd love people's
feedback.
1. Allow people to set a prefix for each app in the settings.py file.
This would basically tell the app what URLs that are mapped to it
start with, and views and templates inside the app could use this
when they want to create internally mapped URLs. By default, it would
also pass control of any URL starting with the prefix to the given
app's urls.py module, much as already happens, I imagine, in most
people's implementations, but the prefix would be an attribute of the
app, rather than some unconnected string as it is now.
2. Allow each app to optionally specify a context_processor(request)
function in their __init__.py file. By default, all the context
processors that exist would be called in the order that the apps are
listed in the INSTALLED_APPS attribute. Obviously, this could be
dangerous because apps could try to define different values in the
context using the same key. Maybe we could do some kind of fake
namespacing ( {{ app.key }} to avoid that.
3. Develop some kind of explicit way that apps can declare
dependencies on other apps so that apps can just be dropped in with
any dependencies, their prefixes set, and they be good to go.
Or maybe we don't need any of this and I'm just being overly anal
retentive.
Todd
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