I’ve have it in my head to extract/rewrite parts of Paste lately. Tempita was one example.

The request and response functions in Paste grew very organically. I wasn’t trying to create a framework, so I studiously avoided anything that might look like a request or response object. I felt that would be stepping on toes or something. Eventually, though, Ben Bangert really wanted a request object for Pylons, and it went in paste.wsgiwrappers. And at a certain point I decided that the class-based access was really just fine, and doing lots of function(environ, ...) was no better than Request(environ).function(...).

So I started WebOb. WebOb has Request, Response, and some exceptions, incorporating the functionality of Paste’s paste.request, paste.response, paste.wsgilib, paste.httpexceptions, and paste.httpheaders. And some extra stuff.

I’ve included a comparison with a few other framework request/response objects. What this doesn’t note, though, is that WebOb has a much larger Request and Response objects. I’ve taken almost all the HTTP headers and mapped them to parsed attributes. So req.if_modified_since returns a datetime object, and req.if_none_match returns a somewhat set-like object, as a few examples. I created a lot of view-like objects for this, representing the canonical form of the information in several other forms (the WSGI request environment, and the status/headers/body of the response).

It’s fairly well tested and includes almost everything I think it should include, but I reserve the right to change the API any way I want until 1.0; this means if you have any opinion on the API I have nothing to stop me from taking your opinions into account.

Oh, and it has docs, really. They may not be the best docs, but they mention most everything and are automatically tested for accuracy. If you just want a sense of the feel, maybe the file-serving example would be a good place to start (though really you’ll only read about the Response object there).