zanshin 0.6 (experimental)

High-level library for HTTP, WebDAV and CalDAV operations

Overview

Zanshin is a library for collaboration over HTTP, WebDAV and CalDAV. It was originally conceived by Lisa Dusseault, and is currently being developed and maintained by Grant Baillie. Its primary client is the Chandler Sharing Project.

Goals

• High-level API: Zanshin works at the level of resources and properties of resources, rather than HTTP requests and responses. This, coupled with careful thought about what data to persist, will hopefully lead to an easier-to-use and better performing API than what you get by making the obvious 1:1 mapping between Python method calls and HTTP requests.
• Asynchronicity via the Twisted networking framework. For an excellent discussion of Chandler's use of Twisted, see TwistedHome.

Documentation

See Lisa's original design notes.

There are docstrings ranging from sparse to thorough in code itself. You can generate epydoc strings by running:

python setup.py doc

inside the project directory. (The zanshin.webdav module contains a fairly detailed doctest).

Installation

The project uses setuptools, and is therefore installable via the setup.py script, or by using the standard easy_install script.

Source code

The (read-only) subversion trunk is: http://svn.osafoundation.org/zanshin/trunk

Er, What Does "Zanshin" Mean, Anyway?

Zanshin means both readiness and follow-through; it's the attitude of being ready for what happens and complete in how you react to it. Lisa picked "zanshin" to sound cool (Japanese!) and to convey the first Goal above.