Fast CGI with Python on UNIX and alternatives

[Tim Roberts]

Doru-Catalin Togea <doru-cat at ifi.uio.no> wrote:
>
>Skimming fast through some Perl mailing, I read there are some Perl
>modules which are loaded into memory on web-servers once, and reside there
>and keep serving Perl CGI scripts, in order to make them fast.
>
>Is there anything similar available for Python? If so, is it common to
>have it installed, or will I have to take it up with my ISS?

There are several things available, but your first step should be to
determine whether or not you need them.  mod_perl is practically mandatory,
because the Perl interpreter is so vast that even a trivial program takes
multiple seconds to load.  Python does not suffer so much from that bloat,
so plain old CGI it be good enough for many sites.

>Finally, I read in some articles that using <table> tags to format HTML
>output is old-fashioned and that we should go over to CSS.

Someday that will be true.  For now, any kind of tricky CSS does not work
on a fair number of browsers.
-- 
- Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.