Alan deLevie

I like using App Engine’s webapp framework. It’s very simple and similar to the web.py framework. However, simple tasks such as outputting data or rendering templates require way too much boilerplate text. For example, to output a rendered template, you must type:

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    template_values = {
      'greetings': greetings,
      'url': url,
      'url_linktext': url_linktext,
      }
 
    path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'index.html')
    self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))

To avoid this morass of boilerplate code, and to better keep track of your code, simply add the following snippet to the beginning of every instance of the RequestHandler class (each “page,” if you will):

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disp = self.response.out.write
def render(template_name, template_values):
          path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '%s' % template_name)
          disp(template.render(path, template_values))

Now to render a template, simply use return render('index.html', {'form' : someForm()}).
Think of this as App Engine’s version of Django’s Render_to_Response function ;).
Similarly, if all you want to do is spit out data that won’t go through a template just use return disp("some string").