Thursday, June 18, 2009

NWSGI 2.0 Beta 1

NWSGI 2.0 Beta 1 is now available. This is a major update to NWSGI that makes it easier to install and use and dramatically improves the management story.

So, what happened to 1.1?

Originally, NWSGI 1.1 was going to be a refresh of v1.0 that supported IronPython 2.6 and fixed a few bugs. NWSGI 2.0 was going to completely overhaul large parts of the management UI and make some deeper changes to the handler itself. However, I got a week off with some rain and v2.0 progressed much quicker than expected; v1.1 was obsolete before it was even released.

So, v1.1 was dropped and v2.0 will be the first IronPython 2.6-compatible release. It’s easy to make breaking changes when you have no customers :).

What’s New

  • Easier configuration. In v1.0 there were different ways to configure NWSGI depending on your configuration. Now there is only one way to do it. Some of the more ambiguous options have also been cleaned up, and new ones added to support IronPython 2.6.
  • Better management UI. IIS 7 includes a rich UI framework for developing management extensions, but doesn’t have much documentation on it. Some spelunking with reflector showed me better ways to do pretty much everything; not much of the v1.0 management code is left.
  • Performance improvements. NWSGI will now cache the WSGI callable instead of reloading it each time.
  • Other misc. fixes. I really need to get into the habit of adding a Codeplex issue for each bug so that I can keep track of what I’ve fixed.

Give it a spin

The Codeplex wiki needs to be updated to reflect the new documentation, but the included readme is up to date. I’ll also be posting a series of blogs posts over the next few weeks that will explain all the features of NWSGI and provide some helpful examples. Remember, this is a Beta release, so please let me know if you encounter any issues.