Python & TKInter applets

[Alex Martelli]

"Robert Johnson" <rjohnson at exotic-eo.com> wrote in message
news:3ad551cd$0$36583$e2e8da3 at nntp.cts.com...
> I would be developing for a Windows NT server and would probably use a
> server-side solution since our customer base is not huge so our website is
> not heavily used (the general public would probably not have much
interest).

To run server-side on NT, you get to choose between IIS, Apache, Xitami,
and other webservers yet.  Python integrates very well with any of them,
in different ways depending on the webserver's architecture.  Simplest
with IIS may be to use active-server-pages (ASP's) and ensure that the
Python version you're running is ActiveScripting compliant (either get
ActivePython from the ActiveState site, or the Python Windows installer
from www.python.org and install the win32all extensions from ActiveState
on top of that).  You can also choose to run your Python solution as
a CGI script, of course.  Maybe the best approach is to use Webware,
http://webware.sourceforge.net/, which lets you program your Python
software to a higher level of abstraction and takes care of many
details on your behalf.

TKinter is not relevant to any of these server-side approaches.  You
will use standard HTML forms to get the input parameters, and generate
your plot as an image (or with SVG, as I already indicated, but that
would require your clients to get & install the SVG plug-in).  Plotting
to an image file from Python is VERY well supported by several packages,
see for example http://graphite.sourceforge.net/ (there are many other
possibilities, of course, but Graphite sounds good).  You can return
the image right from your Python script, or, maybe better, have the
script return an HTML response which SRC's the image from a dynamically
generated URL to a server-side file, so you can have buttons and other
form elements as well as the plot itself on the response-page.


Alex