[Web-SIG] WSGI in standard library

[Alan Kennedy]

[Alan Kennedy]
 >>>Maybe we need a PEP

[Bill Janssen]
 >>Great idea!  That's exactly what I thought when I organized this SIG a
 >>couple of years ago.

[Guido van Rossum]
 > At first I was going to respond "+1". But the fact that a couple of
 > years haven't led to much suggests that it's unlikely to be fruitful;
 > there just are too many diverging ideas on what is right. (Which makes
 > sense since it's a huge and fast developing field.)

Having considered the area for a couple of days, I think you're right: 
the generic concept "web", as in web-sig, covers far too much ground, 
and there are too many schools of thought.

 > So unless someone (Alan Kennedy?) actually puts forward a PEP and gets
 > it through a review of the major players on web-sig, I'm skeptical.

But there is a subset which I think is achievable, namely http support, 
which IMO is the subset that most needs a rework. And now that we have a 
nice web standard, WSGI, it would be nice to make use of it to refactor 
the current http support. The following are important omissions in the 
current stdlib.

  - Asynchronous http client/server support (use asyncore? twisted?)
  - SSL support in threaded http servers
  - Asynchronous SSL support
  - Simple client file upload support
  - HTTP header parsing support, e.g. language codes, quality lists, etc
  - Simple object publishing framework?

Addressing all of the above would be significant piece of work. And 
IMHO, it is only achievable by staying focussed on http and NOT 
addressing requirements such as

  - Content processing, e.g. html tidy, html parsing, css parsing
  - Foreign script language parsing or execution
  - Page templating API

I think it would be a good idea to address these concerns in separate PEPs.

[Guido van Rossum]
 > I certainly don't want this potential effort to keep us from adding
 > the low-hanging fruit (wsgiref, with perhaps some tweaks as PJE can
 > manage based on recent feedback here) to the 2.5 stdlib.

Completely agreed. Any web-related PEPs are going to take a long time, 
and are unlikely to be ready in time for 2.5.

Regards,

Alan.