ANN: Snakelets 1.35 (simple-to-use web app server with dynamic pages)

[Alan Kennedy]

[Irmen de Jong]
> I'm happy to say that Snakelets 1.35 is available.
> 
> Snakelets is a very simple-to-use Python web application server.
> This project provides a built-in threaded web server (so you don't
> need to set up Apache or another web server), Ypages (HTML+Python
> language, similar to Java's JSPs) and Snakelets: code-centric page
> request handlers (similar to Java's Servlets).
> Snakelets is fully unicode compatible and it's possible to run it
> from a CD (read-only mode).
> 
> It's released under the open-source MIT Software license.
> 
> You can download from http://snakelets.sourceforge.net
> (go to the SF project site, and then the file section).

Irmen,

Thanks for your all your great work on Snakelets.

Have you considered maybe porting Snakelets to WSGI? WSGI is a new 
server/gateway standard for portability of python web frameworks, and is 
specified in PEP 333.

http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0333.html

WSGI specifies a HTTP API which is implementable on most conceivable web 
platforms. Code built on this API is fully portable to

1. All WSGI compliant "servers", i.e. pure python WSGI servers.
2. ALL WSGI "gateways", i.e. other non-python servers for which a python 
WSGI layer has been developed.

WSGI is an excellent piece of work, by a fine designer, Phillip J. Eby, 
of PEAK and PyProtocols fame.

Porting to WSGI would bring the following benefits

1. The ability to run Snakelets under any WSGI server/gateway, e.g. 
mod_python, CGI, BaseHTTPServer, etc, etc. (No WSGI adapters seem to 
exist for Twisted, Medusa or Zope though: the asynch API is still under 
discussion on the web-sig).

2. The ability to factor out the need (and maintenance burden, security 
exposure, etc) for a custom standalone server, i.e. instead use a 
standard server, e.g. BaseHTTPWSGIServer, and get automatic threading or 
forking support, etc.

3. Possibly run Snakelets on Java/Jython! The latter is only possible if 
Snakelets is 2.1 compliant, i.e. does not use python 2.2 or 2.3 features.

4. Immediately be able run Snakelets on IronPython when it becomes 
available, and a when (very simple!) WSGI gateway layer has been written 
for whatever web servers can run .Net web applications. This support 
would come for free: ideally, no modification to Snakelets would be needed.

You could currently run Snakelets on java with modjy, an open-source 
WSGI compliant gateway I've written on top of J2EE servlets. Docs, 
details and downloads here

http://www.xhaus.com/modjy

I have high hopes for WSGI to help simplify the confusing landscape of 
server platforms upon which python web frameworks can and cannot run. 
IMHO, portability of python web application frameworks to all possible 
web servers, pure python or not, should be an inherent out-of-the-box 
capability, not an exercise in code engineering.

kind regards,

-- 
alan kennedy
------------------------------------------------------
email alan:              http://xhaus.com/contact/alan