In TurboGears 1.0, you could easily drop MochiKit into every page. You just added an entry to your .cfg file, and the script import would appear. In the past few years, a number of JavaScript libraries have burst on the scene, and every developer has his or her favorite. For TG2, we decided to leave the JavaScript Library choice up to you.
Luckily, TG has provided wrappers for all of the major JS libraries, including:
- JQuery
- Dojo
- Extjs
- Yui
- Mootools
- and yes, Mochikit
The easiest way to take advantage of these ToscaWidget wrapper libraries is to install them, and then inject the main JavaScript widget into the WSGI environment for every page. Let’s see how we do this with Dojo. First, we need to install tw.dojo:
easy_install tw.dojo
Then, we want to modify the base controller in our project so that it injects the js file link on every page call. Open up the mytgapp/lib/base.py file. Add the import for your selected JS app at the top of the file, in our case, this is dojo_js:
from tw.dojo import dojo_js
Next, modify the __call__ method of the BaseController. Call the inject method inside the __call__ method:
dojo_js.inject()
You should now see a JavaScript link in your HTML:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/toscawidgets/resources/tw.dojo/static/1.3.2/min/dojo/dojo.js" djConfig="isDebug: false, parseOnLoad: true"></script>
That’s pretty much it. You have to figure out what library uses what name for thier js widgets, but most of them are fairly obvious. The other alternative is to put the file in your static directory, and add it directly to your master.html template.