Using python on the web

[Martijn Faassen]

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:

http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/apyllo.py/812237977.127386987

Also look at the 'info' category of the Vaults.

Good luck!

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?