Happy Second Birthday Grok!

Happy Second Birthday Grok!

Grok the codebase is 2 years old this week. Two years ago we had the first Grok sprint in Halle, Germany, at the Gocept offices. A lot has happened since then. For me personally Grok is my development workhorse now and has been since early 2007. It's something I use during development every day.

Let's review some of the highlights of whave happened since last year's birthday.

• Grok has a Plone-based website. This site hopefully looks welcoming to new users and thanks to the CMS backing it, it allows people to contribute documentation for Grok easily.

• In addition to the Plone-driven website, Grok has a sphinx driven documentation website. This allows the developers to maintain important pieces of documentation in subversion, along with the codebase.

• Grok now officially works with Python 2.5.

• Grok's technology became usable in non-Grok Zope 3 applications and in Zope 2 as well, as we split off important functionality into reusable libraries.

• Some feature highlights since the last year are viewlet support and ZCML auto-inclusion, as well as eggbasket support for grokproject.

What's currently in the works?

• From what I've seen, Grok's going to really improve the development experience in the next feature release of the Silva CMS. A lot of the drive to port Grok technology to Zope 2 has also come from members of the Plone community, so I have good hopes that Plone will benefit from Grok technology as well. I know there is currently a lot of pain felt by Plone developers - too many ways to do things, and too many files to edit. I hope Grok technology can be useful to make their lives easier.

• WSGI out-of-the-box support is still in the works, but should be released very soon now. People have been using Grok with WSGI for a long time now, but we still need to ship with a story that works straight away.

• People have been working on improving integration between Grok and the powerful z3c.form form generation and handling library.

• We've worked a lot on Grok's integration with SQLAlchemy in the form of megrok.rdb. An initial release of this package should be around the corner.

• We've been reviewing how Grok's view story works in connection with inheritance, and we have hopes to improve this.

• We've been working on improving Grok's support for the inclusion of static resources.

I think we should be heading towards a Grok 1.0 release within the next couple of months. Meanwhile, we're already thinking about larger changes that can go into Grok afterwards. I think there are quite a few exciting technologies that should be included in Grok out of the box, and also a lot of opportunities for engineering Grok's underlying technology to be even better.