Everybody in Django world seems to hate threadlocals(http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/4280, http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CookBookThreadlocalsAndUser). I read Armin’s essay on this(http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2006/7/10/why-i-cant-stand-threadlocal-and-others), but most of it hinges on threadlocals is bad because it is inelegant.
I have a scenario where theadlocals will make things significantly easier. (I have a app where people will have subdomains, so all the models need to have access to the current subdomain, and passing them from requests is not worth it, if the only problem with threadlocals is that they are inelegant, or make for brittle code.)
Also a lot of Java frameworks seem to be using threadlocals a lot, so how is their case different from Python/Django ‘s?
I don’t think there is anything wrong with threadlocals – yes, it is a global variable, but besides that it’s a normal tool. We use it just for this purpose (storing subdomain model in the context global to the current request from middleware) and it works perfectly.
So I say, use the right tool for the job, in this case threadlocals make your app much more elegant than passing subdomain model around in all the model methods (not mentioning the fact that it is even not always possible – when you are overriding django manager methods to limit queries by subdomain, you have no way to pass anything extra to get_query_set, for example – so threadlocals is the natural and only answer).