[Web-SIG] CGI in PEP 444

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 7:53 AM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 12:43 PM 1/4/2011 +0000, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>> Alice Bevan­McGregor <alice at ...> writes: > > [1] http:://bit.ly/e7rtI6 So,
>> while we are at it, could we get rid of the "CGI server example" in this new
>> SWGI spec? This is 2011, and we should promote modern idioms, not encourage
>> people to do 1995 Web programming. 10 years ago, CGI was already frown upon.
>> (and even the idea that WSGI should provide some kind of CGI compatibility
>> sounds a bit ridiculous to me) Regards Antoine.
>
> I still use CGI for the odd one-off, testing, prototyping, etc., and it's by
> far the easiest thing to deploy on a lot of web hosts.  Hell, even Google
> App Engine *emulates* CGI in its default deployment configuration, IIRC.  So
> it's not exactly obsolete.

Right. Note that App Engine does not copy the full CGI mechanism -- it
doesn't start a new process for each request. But it does use
os.environ to set the request parameters for each request. However, in
practice, all but the simplest test apps use a custom WSGI bridge, and
we are considering dropping CGI in favor of WSGI in a future version
of the App Engine runtime.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)