New tools in the TG controllers module

After taking a look at some changes made to the TurboGears controller module in trunk, I must say I'm impressed with the improvements over the current 1.0.x branch.

The first change I noticed was that all classes are now derived from the WSGIController class from the Pylons Python web framework. Also new, and the most interesting in my view, are the hook processing mechanism implemented by the DecoratedController class. What this means is that developers writing TurboGears applications can define hooks that are processed in any of these controller states:

• before validation
• before the controller method is called
• before the rendering takes place
• after the rendering has happened

If nothing else, I think this will add great value in monitoring the state transitions in larger TurboGears applications. Some requests can be quite large; especially during development time and it is handy to know where this requests are failing. You can now easily log attribute values of your controller instance before validation takes place. This could give some insight as to why the validation is failing with valid values. These hook processors also allow for pre and post processing for every state transition within the controller life-cycle.

It looks like using a controller is not all that different from the current TurboGears. Simply extend the TGController class and expose your methods as needed.