Trac on Jython - Genshi Support

(I was going to add this as a comment to NixDev Open Source Blog but the commenting system for that blog is currently broken. So here's my response, and maybe it will get me to start blogging here again too.)

There has been less interest in Genshi from Jython development as of late, probably because Mako is a very good alternative for Turbogears 2 and Pylons. But you need Genshi for Trac, so here's what you might do:

• expat. Jython 2.5 has an implementation of expat (Lib/xml/parses/expat.py) that wraps SAX sufficiently that all of the unit tests for ElementTree pass. The only problem is that it's somewhat slow, since the wrapper is in Python. I would see that as a starting point to selective rewriting in Java, which is much easier to do in Jython than in CPython. Perhaps with just a little more emulation work it will also work with Genshi?
  
  
• AST. Jython 2.5 implements the standard _ast and ast (the latter actually part of 2.6, but we needed it!) modules; we do not have any support for the older compiler module. I don't know the status of changeset 31 to support AST, but if it has been incorporated, or can be, we can work with this part then.
  
  
• CPython bytecode. Lastly Jython 2.5 implements a CPython bytecode VM. This has been tested by compiling the entire regression test suite into CPython byte code (with CPython, we don't yet have a compiler for this path!), and except for some cases around code introspection and minor differences in floating point representation (which is an artifact of using CPython for the compilation process), it passes. So you should be able to generate bytecode and just have it run. Look at Lib/test/test_pbcvm.py for some details here.
  
  

Good luck! Feel free to ask any questions on the jython-dev mailing list or #jython on IRC.