A Review of the Web

Morepath is a web framework. Here is a quick review of how the web works, how applications can be built with it, and how Morepath fits.

HTTP protocol

HTTP is a protocol by which clients (such as web browsers) and servers can communicate. The client sends a HTTP request, and the server sends back a HTTP response. HTTP is extensible, and can be extended with content types, new headers, and so on.

Version 1.1 of HTTP is most common on the web today. It is defined by a bunch of specifications:

Luckily it’s not necessary to understand the full details of these specifications to develop a web application. We’ll go into a basic overview of relevant concepts in this document.

Morepath handles the HTTP protocol on the server side: creating a response to incoming HTTP requests.

Web browser

A web browser such as Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer uses the HTTP protocol to talk to web servers.

A web browser is a type of HTTP client.

Web server

A web server implements the HTTP protocol to respond to requests from HTTP clients such as web browsers.

There are general web servers such as Apache and Nginx. These are programmable in various ways.

There are also more specific web servers that are geared at particular tasks. Examples of these are Waitress and Gunicorn which are geared towards serving web applications written in Python.

A web server is programmable in various ways. Morepath can plug into web servers that implement the Python WSGI protocol.

Web application

A web application is software that presents a user interface by means of a web browser. The web browser is usually a visible piece of software, but may also be embedded in other software, such as in FirefoxOS.

A web application is loaded from a web server. After it is loaded it can still interact with the web server (or other web servers). The web server can implement part of the application logic and maintains the application data.

The dynamic behavior of a web application used to be implemented almost entirely by the server, but it is now also possible to implement a large part of their behavior within the web browser instead, using the JavaScript language.

Morepath code runs entirely on the server, but supports web applications that want to implement a large part of their dynamic behavior within the web browser.

Web service

A web service does not present a user interface to the user. A web service instead presents an application programming interface (API) to custom HTTP client software. The API is to this software what the UI is to the user.

You can layer a full web application on top of a web service. Such layering can result in looser coupling in the implementation, which tends to increase the quality of the implementation.

Morepath helps developers to implement web services.

Custom HTTP client

A web browser is one form of HTTP client, but other HTTP software can be written in a variety of languages to talk to a web server programmatically. This uses it as a web service.

JavaScript code in a web browser can also use the browser’s facilities to talk to the web server programmatically (a technique called AJAX), and can thus serve as a custom HTTP client as well.

Framework

A library is reusable code that your code calls, whereas a framework is reusable code that calls your code. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”.

A framework aims to help you do particular tasks quickly; you only need to fill in the details, and the framework handles the rest.

There is a gray area between library and framework. Morepath is mostly a framework.

Server web framework

A framework that helps you program the behavior of a web server. Morepath is a server web framework written in the Python programming language.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language that is run in the browser. It can use the web browser APIs (such as the DOM) to manipulate the web page, get user input, or access the server programmatically (AJAX).

JavaScript can also be run on the server with Node.JS, but Morepath is a Python web framework and does not make use of server-side JavaScript.

Bower is a tool to help manage client-side JavaScript code.

Bower

A popular way to install client-side JavaScript (and CSS) code is to use the Bower package management tool. By using a package manager installing and updating a collection of JavaScript libraries becomes more easy than doing it by hand.

Morepath offers Bower integration, see: Static resources with Morepath.

AJAX

AJAX is a technique to access resources programmatically from a browser application in JavaScript. These resources typically have a JSON representation.

Client web framework

There are also client-side web frameworks that let you program the behavior of a web browser, typically called “JavaScript MVC framework”. Examples of such are React, Ember and Angular.

Morepath supports client-side code that uses a client web framework, but does not implement a client web framework itself. You can pick whichever you want.

WSGI

WSGI is a Python protocol by which Python code can be integrated with a web server. WSGI can also be used to implement framework components which are layered between application code and server.

A morepath.App instance implements the WSGI protocol and can therefore be integrated with a WSGI-compliant web server and WSGI framework component.

HTTP request

A HTTP request is a message a HTTP client sends to the server. The server then returns a HTTP response.

The HTTP request contains a URL path, a request method, possibly a request body, and various headers such as the content type.

A HTTP request in Morepath is made accessible programmatically as a Python request object using the WebOb library. It is a morepath.Request, which is a subclass of webob.request.BaseRequest.

HTTP response

A HTTP response returns a representation of the resource indicated by the path of the request as the response body. The response has a content type which determines what representation is being sent. The response also has a status code that indicates whether the request could be handled, or the reason why a detailed response could not be generated.

A lot of different representations exist. HTML is a very common one, but for programmatic clients JSON is typically used.

Morepath lets you create a morepath.Response object directly, which is a subclass of webob.response.Response, and return it from a view function.

More conveniently you use a specialized view type (morepath.App.json() or morepath.App.html()) and return the content that should go into the response body, such as a HTML string or a JSON-serializable object. Morepath then automatically creates the response with the right content type for you. Should you wish to set additional information on the response object, you can use morepath.Request.after().

Resource

A resource is anything that can be addressed on the web by a URL (or URI or IRI). Can be a web page presenting a full UI (using HTML + CSS), or can be a piece of information (typically in JSON), or can also be an abstract entity that has no representation at all.

Morepath lets you implement resources of all kinds. Normally Morepath resources have representations, but it is also possible to implement abstract entities that have just a URL and have no representation. Morepath can also help you create links to resources on other web servers.

URL

Here is an example of a URL:

http://example.com/documents/3

A HTTP client such as a web browser uses URLs to determine:

  • What protocol to use to talk to the server (in this case http).
  • What host to talk to (in this case example.com). This identifies the web server, though a complex host may be implemented using a combination of web servers.
  • What path to request from the server (in this case /documents/3).

The server determines how it responds to requests for particular paths.

URL parameters

A URL can have additional parameters:

http://example.com/documents/3?expand=1&highlight=foo

The list of parameters start with ?. Names are connected with values using =, and name/value pairs are connected with &.

Path

A path is a way for a client to address a particular resource on a server. It is part of the request. The path is also part of URLs, and thus can be used for linking resources.

Morepath connects paths with Python objects using the path directive (morepath.App.path()): it can resolve a path to a Python object, and construct a path for a given Python object. This is described in Paths and Linking.

Example:

@App.path(path='/documents/{id}', model=Document)
def get_document(id):
   return query_document(id)

If you declare arguments for get_document that do not get listed as variables in the path these are interpreted as expected URL parameters.

Headers

A HTTP request and a HTTP response have headers. Headers contain information about the message that are not the body: they are about the request or the response, or about the body. For example, the content-type is header named Content-Type and has a value that is a MIME type such as text/html.

Headers are used for a wide variety of purposes, such as to declare information about how a client may cache a response, or what kind of responses a client accepts from a server, or to pass cookies along. Here is an overview of common headers.

In Morepath, the headers are accessible on a request and response object as the attribute webob.request.BaseRequest.headers and webob.response.Response.headers. which behaves like a Python dictionary. You could therefore access the request content-type using request.headers['Content-Type']. But see below for a more convenient way to access the content type.

To set the headers (or other information) on a response, you can create a morepath.Response instance in a view function. You can then pass in the headers, or set them afterward.

Often better is to use the morepath.Request.after() decorator to declare a function that sets headers the response object once it has been created for you by the framework.

WebOb has APIs that help you deal with many headers at a higher level of abstraction. For example, webob.request.BaseRequest.content_type is a more convenient way to access the content type information of a request than to access the header directly, as additional charset information is not there. Before you start to manipulate headers directly it pays off to consult the WebOb documentation for webob.request.BaseRequest and webob.response.Response: there may well be a better way.

Morepath also has special support for dealing with certain headers. For instance, the Forwarded header can be set by a HTTP proxy. To make Morepath use this header for URL generation, you can use the more.forwarded extension.

Cookies

One special set of headers deals with HTTP cookies. A server can set a cookie on the client by passing back a special header in its response. A cookie is much like a key/value pair in a Python dictionary.

Once the cookie has been set, the client sends back the cookie to the server during each subsequent request, again using a header, until the cookie expires or cookie is explicitly deleted by the server using a response header.

Normally in HTTP requests are independent from each other: assuming the server database is the same, the same request should give the same response, no matter what other requests have gone before it. This makes it easier to reason about HTTP, and it makes it easier to scale it up, for instance by caching responses.

Cookies change this: they can be used to make requests order-dependent. This can be useful, but it can also make it harder to reason about what is going on and scale, so be careful with them. In particular, a REST web service should be able to function without requiring the client to maintain cookies.

Cookies are commonly used to store login session information on the client.

WebOb makes management of cookies more convenient: the webob.request.BaseRequest.cookies attribute on the request object contains the list of cookies sent by the client, and the response object has an API incuding webob.response.Response.set_cookie() and webob.response.Response.delete_cookie() to allow you to manage cookies.

Content types

A resource may present itself in variety of representations. This is indicated by the content type set in the HTTP response, using the Content-Type header. There are a lot of content types, including HTML and JSON. The value is a MIME type such as text/html for HTML and application/json for JSON. The value can also contain additional parameters such as character encoding information.

WebOb makes content-type header information conveniently available with the webob.request.BaseRequest.content_type, webob.response.Response.content_type and webob.response.Response.content_type_params attributes.

A request may also have a content type: the request content type determines what kind of content is sent to the server by the client in the request body.

While you can create any kind of content type with Morepath, it has special support for generating HTML and JSON responses (using morepath.App.html() and morepath.App.json()), and for processing a JSON request body (see load_json in JSON and objects).

View

In Morepath, a view is a Python function that takes a Python object to represent (self) and a morepath.Request object (request) as arguments and returns something that can be turned into a HTTP response, or a HTTP response object directly.

Here is an example of a Morepath view, using the most basic morepath.App.view() directive:

@App.view(model=MyObject)
def my_object_default(self, request):
    return "some text content"

There are also specific morepath.App.json() and morepath.App.html() directives to support those content types.

See Views for much more on how to construct Morepath views.

HTTP request method

A HTTP request has a method, also known as HTTP verb. The GET method is used to retrieve information from the server. The POST method is used to add new information to the server (for instance a form submit), and the PUT method is used to update existing information. The DELETE method is used to delete information from the server.

It is up to the server implementation how to exactly handle the request method. With Morepath, by default a view responds to the GET method, but you can also write views to handle the other HTTP methods, by indicating it with a view predicate. Here is a view that handles the POST method (and returns a representation of what has just been POSTed):

@App.view(model=MyCollection, request_method='POST')
def add_to_collection(self, request):
    item = MyItem(request.json)
    self.add(item)
    return request.view(item)

You can access the method on the request using webob.request.BaseRequest.method, but typically Morepath does this for you when you use the request_method predicate.

View predicate

A view predicate in Morepath is used to match a view function with details of self and request.

This view directive:

@App.view(model=MyCollection, request_method='POST')
def add_to_collection(self, request):
   ...

only matches when self is an instance of MyCollection (model predicate) and when request.method is POST (request_method predicate). Only in this case will add_to_collection be called.

You can extend Morepath with additional view predicates. You can also define a predicate fallback, which can be used to specify what HTTP status code to set when the view cannot be matched.

See view predicates

HTTP status codes

HTTP status codes such as 200 Ok and 404 Not Found are part of the HTTP response. Here is a list of HTTP status codes. The server can use them to indicate to the client whether it was successfully able to create a response, or if not, what the problem was.

Morepath can automatically generate the correct HTTP status codes for you in many cases:

200 Ok:
When the path in the request is matched with a path directive, and there is a view for the particular model and request method.
404 Not Found:

When the path does not match, or when the path matches but the path function returns None.

Also when no view is available for the request in combination with the object returned by the path function. More specifically, the model view predicate or the name view predicate do not match.

400 Bad Request:
When information in the path or request parameters could not be converted to the required types.
405 Method Not Allowed:
When no view exists for the given HTTP request method. More specifically, the request_method view predicate does not match.
422 Unprocessable Entity:

When the request body supplied with a POST or PUT request can be parsed (as JSON, for instance), but is not the correct type.

More specifically, the body_model view predicate does not match.

500 Internal Server Error:
There is a bug in the server that causes an exception to be raised. Morepath does not generate these itself, but a WSGI server automatically catches any exceptions not handled by Morepath and turns them into 500 errors.

Instead of having to write code that sends back the right status codes manually, you declare paths and views with Morepath and Morepath can usually do the right thing for you automatically. This saves you from writing a lot of custom code when you want to implement HTTP properly.

Sometimes it is still useful to set the status code directly. WebOb lets you raise special exceptions for HTTP errors. You can also set the webob.response.Response.status attribute on the response.

JSON

A representation of a resource. JSON is a language that represents data, not user interface (like HTML combined with CSS) or logic (like Python or JavaScript). JSON looks like this:

{
  "id": "foo_barson",
  "name": "Foo Barson",
  "occupation": "Carpenter",
  "level": 34
  "friends": ["http://example.com/people/qux_quxson",
              "http://example.com/people/one_twonson"]
}

JSON is the most common data representation language used in REST web services. The main alternative is XML. While XML does offer more extensive tooling support, it is a lot more verbose and more difficult to process than JSON. JSON is already very close to the data structures of many programming languages, including JavaScript and Python.

In Python, JSON can be constructed by combining Python dictionaries and lists with strings, numbers, booleans and None.

With Morepath you can use the morepath.App.json() directive to generate JSON programmatically:

@App.json(model=MyObject)
def my_object_default(self, request):
     return {
        "id": self.id,
        "name": self.name,
        "occuptation": self.get_occupation(),
        "level": self.level,
        "friends": [request.link(friend) for friend in self.friends]
     }

This works like the view directive, but in addition converts the return value of the function into a JSON response that is sent to the client.

JSON-LD

JSON-LD is an extension of JSON that helps support linked data in JSON. Any JSON-LD structure is valid JSON, but not every JSON structure is valid JSON-LD.

Using a @context, it lets a JSON object describe which parts of it contain hyperlinks, and also allows JSON property names themselves to be interpreted as unique hyperlinks. You can also express that particular property values have a particular data type; this can range from basic data types like datetime to custom data types like “person”. All of this can help when you want to process JSON coming from different data sources.

Perhaps more important in practice for REST web services is that it also offers a standard way for a JSON object to have a unique id and a type. Both are identified by a hyperlink, as the special @id and @type properties. @type in particular makes it easier to use JSON data as hypermedia: client behavior can be driven by the type of data that is retrieved, instead of what URL it happened to be retrieved from.

Morepath does not mandate the use of JSON-LD, or has any special support for it, but its link generation facilities make it easier to use it.

HTTP API

A HTTP API is a web service that is built on HTTP; it is based on the notion of HTTP resources on URLs and has an understanding of HTTP request methods.

This is to distinguish it from a web service implementation where HTTP is merely a transport mechanism, such as SOAP.

Because the client needs to understand what URLs exist on the server and how to interpret their response, the coupling between client and server code is relatively tight.

This type of web service is commonly called a REST web service, but the original definition of REST goes beyond this and adds hypermedia. Many HTTP APIs only reach level 2 on the Richardson Maturity Model, which isn’t full REST yet.

A HTTP API is sometimes simply called API, which is also confusing, as the word API has a lot of other uses in development outside of HTTP.

Morepath is designed to help you build HTTP APIs, but also to go you a step further to full REST.

REST web service

Morepath helps you to create REST web service, also known as a hypermedia API.

This is level 3 on the Richardson Maturity Model.

This means that to interact with the content of the web service you can follow hyperlinks. A client starts at one root URL and to get to other information it follow links in the content.

Different JSON resources can be distinguished from each other by their type; this can based on the content-type of the response, or be based on information within the content itself, such as a type property in JSON (@type in JSON-LD).

In other words, the web service represents itself to software much like a web site presents itself to a human: as content with links.

A REST web service allows for a looser coupling between server and client than a plain HTTP API allows, as the client does not need to know more than a single entry point URL into the server, and only needs an understanding of the response types and how to navigate links.

HTML and CSS

HTML is a markup language used to represent a resource. Augmented by CSS, a style language, it determines what you see on a web page.

HTML can be loaded from a files on the server; this typically done with a general web server such as Apache and Nginx. For dynamic applications HTML can also be generated on the server, often using a server-side templating language.

HTML may also be manipulated programmatically in the browser using JavaScript through the DOM API.

In Morepath you can use the morepath.App.html() view directive to generate HTML programmatically:

@App.view(model=MyObject)
def my_object_default(self, request):
     return '<html><head></head><body></body></html>'

Morepath at this point does not have support for server-side templating.

See Static resources with Morepath for information on how you can load static resources such as CSS and JavaScript automatically to augment a HTML page.

Web page

The browser displays a user interface to the user in the form of a web page. A web page is usually constructed using HTML and CSS. Other content such as images, video, audio, SVG, canvas, WebGL may also be embedded into it.

JavaScript code is executed in the browser to make the user interface more dynamic, and this dynamism can go very far.

A web page is loaded by putting a URL in the address bar of the browser. The browser then fetches it (and related resources) from the server. You can do this manually, or by clicking a link, or the URL of the browser may be changed programmatically with JavaScript code.

In the past, all web applications were implemented as a multiple web pages that were generated on the server in response to user actions.

It is also possible to change the URL in the address bar without fetching a complete new web page from the server. This technique is used to implement single-page web applications.

Single-page web application

A single-page web application (SPA) is web application that consists of a single web page that is updated within the browser without the need to load a complete need web page. So the web page is loaded from the server only once, when the user first goes there.

When a user interacts with it, JavaScript code is executed that updates the user interface and may also interact with a web server using AJAX.

A single page web application may update the URL in the address bar of the browser, and respond to URL changes, but it is the same web page that implements the behavior for all these URLs. It may need a bit of server-side support to do so.

Morepath supports the creation of single-page web applications. It also lets you create multi-page applications, but at this point in time has no special support for server-side templating.