Server side newbie

[Peter Hansen]

jimlewis at emachineshop.com wrote:
> Thanks for the comments. I do know basic HTML although it seems like
> writing in assembly language. Filling in the blanks you outlined: my
> ISP is pair.com and they show python as available. My site is
> quirkle.com. True I did not think much about hooking my app to the web
> but I had, I think, a reasonably justified impression that python
> helped make it easy to develop web apps.

Python _does_ make it easy to develop web apps, though it doesn't make 
it so easy that you can get away without knowing some of the ugly 
details about the web.

Given that you've got a handle on GUI programming, with the right 
framework you might not have that much trouble doing web stuff either. 
One thing that might be of help is this page 
http://pyre.third-bit.com/pyweb/index.html which compares in some detail 
several of the more popular frameworks.  The page at 
http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebProgramming provides a possibly 
exhaustive list of the existing frameworks.  The diversity shown there 
is certainly related to the fact that the world hasn't yet figured out 
how to make all kinds of web programming quite as standardized as GUI 
programming has become.

I can't recommend a solution that I know would work for you, but I can 
suggest you consider starting by looking at CherryPy (mentioned on both 
the above), as a fairly self-contained and straightforward approach to 
doing web work in Python.  If you can adapt your GUI structure to the 
web, CherryPy should let you implement it fairly easily and quickly, 
though it is not intended to do everything for you but rather to make it 
simple to do the fundamental things that web servers still need to do.

-Peter