Newbie - web app deployment issues

[Scrumpy]

paul at boddie.net (Paul Boddie) wrote in
news:23891c90.0204090043.287c317f at posting.google.com: 

> It probably looks like I'm tracking down all your posts to this
> newsgroup, but then it's a solid topic you're bringing up and I can't
> resist responding. ;-)

No problem, I appreciate your feedback. It is an interesting area 
(developing and deploying web apps based on Python) and I hope any replies 
to my post can also assist other Python newbies.

IMO it would be great if the use of Python in producing web apps was to 
increase. Better promotion and visibility (marketing) of Python to new 
developers and to higher educational establishments is essential.

I'm sure there are skilled people who want to contribute to Open Source 
projects but cannot find ways to do so. In many projects, this is also a 
failing of the project's coordinators. Of course the 'bread and butter' of 
projects is the actual coding and bug testing but establishing a website 
and posting in a few forums and newsgroups is the extent of most projects' 
'marketing' efforts.

PR and marketing is an essential area and one in which people with those 
skills, who want to assist Open Source projects, could make a major 
contribution (cue some appropriately stirring music, hehe!).

BTW, I'm not in PR or marketing, just in case anyone thought I was doing a 
hard sell :-p

>> As a Python newbie who wants to try developing web apps, I want to
>> avoid as much as possible, the need to deploy to specialized hosting
>> environments. For example, out of the many hosting companys in the
>> world, only a very small percentage provide Zope hosting. I haven't
>> confirmed this but there's probably a premium to pay for Zope hosting
>> (which may be warranted but it's not something I want to pay for at
>> this point in time). 
> 
> I've seen http://www.freezope.org, but that seems really to be for
> experimentation only. However, you could always choose a very-low-cost
> Web host which only provides static Web pages and then link to dynamic
> content on FreeZope or other such sites.

Thanks for the pointer.

[snip]

> [1] mxCGIPython is a good start for those wanting a binary, but I then
> discovered the FreeBSD "ports" system (see http://www.freebsd.org) and
> it's possible to find lots of binaries for download in .tar.gz format,
> including various Python extension modules (MySQLdb, for example) -
> it's very convenient indeed!

I had a quick look at the "FreeBSD Ports" system and it looks very 
convenient.

On the other hand, I definitely prefer to test my apps on my home PCs 
before uploading them to a host and that would mean installing and 
familiarizing myself with FreeBSD. 

I don't feel I would be sufficiently disadvantaged by not using FreeBSD and 
will therefore not add it to my current list of things to learn. Something 
for the future perhaps ;-)

FYI, regarding my previous post about web app development, I will begin by 
learning to develop simple Python CGI apps and progress from there.

Cheers,
Scrumpy :)