CheetahKit User's Guide

Installation and Use

• Download CheetahKit.  You will need to have subversion installed.  In a terminal window, issue the command below, which will fetch the latest version of CheetahKit, and copy it to the current directory:

• % svn co http://svn.w4py.org/Examples/CheetahKit

• Add Cheetah to your Python Path.  Since CheetahKit will be compiling your templates inside the Webware process, Webware will need to have Cheetah as well in it's python path.
• Copy CheetahKit to the Webware folder and restart.  When you restart Webware, CheetahKit should be automatically detected and started.
• Test with CheetahKitTest.tmpl.  In the CheetahKit folder is an example file called CheetahKitTest.tmpl.  Copy it to your web context and open it in your browser, e.g.

  http://localhost/Webware/CheetahKitTest

   

Details for the Curious

What does CheetahKit do?

CheetahKit adds a plugin to Webware which tells webware that any files ending with ".tmpl" should be processed by CheetahKit.  When CheetahKit gets such a request, it gets the .tmpl file, compiles it into a .py file and stores it in WebKit/Caches/CheetahKit/.  Then the .py file is compile and returned to Webware as a servlet.  Very often problems with your template compiling can be debugged by reading the Python code that it generated.  You can find this code in the Caches folder mentioned above.

In addition to compiling templates when they are needed, templates that have not been changed are cached in .py and .pyc form so they are fast to load the next time.

Inheritence between Templates

One thing to watch out for with this CheetahKit is inheriting templates from other templates.  CheetahKit will only compile a template when WebKit requests that .tmpl file.  If your template inherits from another template, the parent template is never called by WebKit, so it is never compiled.  If you use inheritence, you will still have to compile the parent templates manually.