[Web-SIG] WSGI and Configuration

[Robert Brewer]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> Anyway, the "app setup" idea was to get things to the 
> point that, in principle, the user would only have to edit 
> configuration files to deploy a WSGI application.
> They shouldn't have to write scripts 
> just to run an application.  Even for middleware stack 
> management, if each piece of middleware had a
> configuration variable to specify what its 
> downstream app-setup call was, you could create the whole 
> thing from server config, as long as you had only
> one instance of a given kind of middleware per stack.
> 
> Anyway, in an ideal world, you shouldn't have to edit the application 
> itself, only its config file(s).  And the application should 
> find out its config file(s) from the server.  Then, the
> application code is reusable to deploy multiple copies
> of the app.  If you can't do that, then the user has 
> to write a script for each deployed instance.

Although I agree (and designed my framework that way), I know not every
framework author thinks that way. At the least, won't some apps expect a
single mapping, some apps expect ConfigParser sections (multiple peer
dictionaries), and some full XML-style trees? Sounds like you're
describing the second of those (which I also use). And some developers
even prefer deployers to write Python scripts, it would seem.

Meh. I'm just speculating that specifying this within WSGI could hurt
its adoption more than help. If we chose to force XML adoption, for
example, I'd be unhappy. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. ;)
It'd be fabulous to standardize.


Robert Brewer
MIS
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org