[Web-SIG] Fun with WSGI -- commenting middleware.

[Titus Brown]

Hi all,

I sat down today to hack out a simple commenting system for HTML
articles, and ended up using WSGI to implement a pipe-style solution.

You can see the results at

	http://www.idyll.org/~t/articles.cgi/

This CGI script serves HTML files from a directory hierarchy.  Anyone
can attach a comment to any HTML file served by the script.

Briefly, the solution consists of two WSGI apps, one a client called
"wsgiServeFiles" and the other a middleware app called "wsgiComment".

The command

	app = wsgiServeFiles(directory)

creates a client app that will serve files out of the given directory
according to fairly simple rules.

The command

	new_app = wsgiComment(app)

creates a wrapped client app that will allow you to comment paths under
the given app.

So, to create the site above, all I did was use the WSGI CGI
implementation and run the following command:

	run_with_cgi(wsgiComment(wsgiServeFiles('/u/t/articles/text')))

The source code is pretty simple.  I wanted something that would run via
CGI and require nothing other than local filesystem access and a Python
installation (no databases, etc.)

The code's available at

	http://www.idyll.org/~t/articles.cgi/source/

It's still pretty hacky, and comments are appreciated.

Note that the commenting system should work for any WSGI client, although I
haven't tried it for anything else yet.

cheers,
--titus