Using IronPython to Configure Castle Windsor

By Michael Foord -
Castle Windsor is a popular .NET Inversion of Control container, but it can be complex to configure. A blogger, who's name I can't discover (put your name on your blogs guys!), has written two articles on using IronPython to configure Castle Windsor.
Castle Windsor is a very popular IoC container in the .Net world. Like almost all other containers it can be configured using either a fluent interface or an xml-based configuration file.

The fluent interface has the advantage of being strongly typed, what spares you a lot of errors caused by typos. On the other hand, it is hard coded and can’t be changed easily without recompiling (Actually you could use an IoC container to load your IoC container configuration dynamically but it give a rise to the question: “How do you configure the container to load its own configuration?” )

The other option is to use an xml file. Despite being the most used solution in almost all containers it is really a very ugly solution. The configuration file can get very big and very complicated.

As I am reading IronPython in Action from Manning Publications, I thought I could configure Windsor using Python and a very tiny DSL. IronPython is an interpreted language for .Net framework. It combines the elegance of Python with the strength of .Net. Since it being interpreted it is a suitable solution for configuration.
In the last article I introduced a small Castle Windsor configuration tool using IronPython. This tool enabled us to add service implementation in an easer to read way. On the other hand advanced usages like optional and constructer parameters were not possible.

In this article I will continue developing Pysor (As I called it!) to accept parameters. Before introducing the new functionality I will show what are parameters and when and how would you want to use them. For the sake of demonstration I will borrow the demo application from the very good article series from Simone Busoli about Castle Windsor. If you didn’t read it then go read it all and come back.

Comments

  1. Damian Powell9/14/2009 3:04 pm

    The blogger's name is Moukarram Kabbash. There are now three articles in the series.

    ReplyDelete

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