The Occasional Occurence

So I've been programming with Python since 2001 and I've never had the need to do anything that the standard import system didn't provide - until this week. We are planning on a little code reorganization for a project at work in preparation for collaboration from more developers. I wrote a simple custom importer/loader that let's a developer write

It's not groundbreaking functionality but it actually does add a little clarity in our situation. The whole task it was made quite simple by the features introduced in PEP 302 (that document is a great reference). Now, before anyone suggests that we could have just pulled the classes in via a __init__.py in the application/components directory, note that some components might depend on others which have not been imported and thus their imports would fail.

Anyhow, like I said, it isn't groundbreaking, but the very fact that you can customize Python's import system is neat. I got to thinking about what other ways I could hack the import system, and came up with a little web importer. I'll post the code below, only because I think it is a clever trick, not that it is something to use in development of a Real Application.

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