Coder’s Eye

Working on Banjo Blog, nearly the only thing remaining before my initial release is a trackback/pingback system.

Oddly enough, there isn’t any django trackback app in the wild, at least not any I could find. So, I looked around and found only half-written stuff, hacky garbage and tblib, which is too old, not Django aware, and GPL. Banjo is BSD and it is going to stay that way, thank you.

So, I wrote my own.

I think it is pretty slick, and I’m planning to package it as a separate app so that all the other Django blogs on the block can have a decent trackback library without reinventing the wheel.

What I probably won’t do is port my tests to work standalone. It turns out that testing this kind of stuff is not so simple in Django. That’s because the HTTP server isn’t “really” running when you are running tests. The Test Client can pull information, true, but it does it by some kind of magic. Try using urllib.urlopen and you can’t get at the page.

That’s too bad, because for trackback autodiscovery, I really need to be able to urlopen the page.

After lamenting for a moment, I sat down to make the tests work. I did it in a straightforward way. I just make a separate settings file which imports the master settings file, and then overrides the database to be in-memory Sqlite. Then I start a test server in the background with ./manage.py testserver &

Put that in a script, and kill the test server after the tests are done. It is a bit kludgy for now, and it certainly won’t work on Windows (but who cares, really?Developing on Windows is an exercise in masochism), but it works and it allows me to test sending and receiving real trackbacks and pingbacks.

Technorati Tags: banjo, django, trackback, pingback, testing