[Web-SIG] Defining a standard interface for common web tasks

Fri Oct 24 03:38:49 EDT 2003

Simon Willison wrote:

> Bill Janssen wrote:
>
>>> Actually, I wrote an application using the cgi module this week - 
>>> it's just been deployed as the system to manage 
>>> http://coupons.lawrence.com/ :)
>>
>>
>> Sure, I write them all the time.  But what's missing?  What do you
>> have to work around?
>
>
> The biggest thing for me is distinguishing between GET and POST data. 
> Sending HTTP headers (including cookies) is also highly inconvenient 
> as with the cgi module they have to be manually constructed as HTTP 
> name:value pairs and sent before the rest of the text.
>
> This is where the request/response object model becomes very 
> attractive  - maybe something like the following:
>
> import web.cgi
>
> req = web.cgi.HTTPRequest() # Auto-populates with data from environment
> if req.POST:
>     # Form has been posted
>     body = 'Hi there, %s' % req.POST['name']
> else:
>     body = '<form method="post"><input type="text" name="name"></form>'
>
> res = web.cgi.HTTPResponse()
> res.content_type = 'text/html'
> res.set_cookie('name', 'Simon')
> res['X-Additional-Header'] = 'Another header'
> res.write('<html><h1>Hi there</h1>\n%s' % body)
> print res

For CGI, it would seem to make sense that you do something like the 
following:
res = web.cgi.HTTPResponse(sys.stdout)
res.content_type = 'text/html'
res.set_cookie('name', 'Simon')
res['X-Additional-Header'] = 'Another header'
res.send_headers()
res.write('<html><h1>Hi there</h1>\n%s' % body)

Then if you end up writing multiple parts, they can be output to stdout 
as they are written, rather than having to generate the entire response 
object first

David