Using python on the web

[Charley Horse]

Thanks to all of those pointers. Finding out that CGI plays an important 
role in the python world was a shock to me as I only started working 
with web stuff in the last couple of years. I've just never touched a 
CGI script, shockingly I suppose <g>. ASP/CF and PHP are what I've 
worked with and CGI was just the "old world" technology for 
interactivity that I read about but never had to work with.

So coming at this as a newbie, and for years hearing about python's 
elegance and oo-ness, it just seemed a strange pairing, python and CGI. 
Puzzling in fact! I see why it makes sense, but it's just not what I 
expected.

I'll fool with CGi and perhaps it won't be enough of a turn off to 
affect my interest.

In article <8di2bk$l1s$1 at newshost.accu.uu.nl>, m.faassen at vet.uu.nl 
says...
> Charley Horse <someone at somewhere.com> wrote:
> > I've just started fooling with python. I've looked around the python 
> > site and a number of the other sites referenced there and am a bit 
> > puzzled. Umm... how does one go about using python for web applications, 
> > especially database driven apps? Almost everything deals with python 
> > just as a language, as C++ would be.
> 
> That's because Python is a language. Python isn't a web-specific language,
> after all. 
> 
> > Not much about the web specifically.
> > I was a bit shocked to find the only direct refs on about 
> > this at python.org are entwined with CGI (unless I missed it).
> 
> Why is CGI so shocking? It's used quite a bit, after all? You can write
> a database driven web application using Python with CGI. CGI from Python
> isn't hard either.
> 
> > I have no exposure to CGI, but rather to php, CF, and ASP, so python has
> > gone from looking very attractive to looking... well, like a puzzle.
> 
> I'm not sure why your exposure to PHP, ColdFusion or ASP instead of CGI
> would turn Python into a puzzle.
> 
> There _is_ ASP support for Python, enabling you to use Python as a
> ASP language. Others will have to explain to you how and where to look
> for information, as I've never used it.
> 
> > I know about Zope, but am interested in how one uses python on the web just
> > by itself.
> 
> Zope would be the equivalent of ColdFusion for Python, as it's a web
> application server.
> 
> Besides using Python with CGI or ASP, you can use Zope's ZPublisher
> (formerly Bobo) independently to publish arbitrary Python objects to the
> web. I've never used this, and the documentation may be scarce, but it
> looks quite neat. You may want to look that up.
> 
> Database integration in Python isn't bad either, look at the database
> topic guide:
> 
> http://www.python.org/topics/database/
> 
> And look at the web topic guide if you haven't seen it:
> 
> http://www.python.org/topics/web/
> 
> The vaults of Parnassus are also a good resource, here is for
> instance a link to its web category: