"python powered"?

[Skip Montanaro]

    ellen> pardon my ignorance, i know little about python, but i've seen
    ellen> the "python powered" icon in several websites.  what exactly does
    ellen> it mean?  are these python cgi scripts?  or python servlets?  or
    ellen> what?

Ellen,

There are lots of Python-related web sorts of things:

    * You can obviously write CGI scripts in Python.

    * You can use Zope, Twister, or other Python-based application servers
      as web servers. 

    * You can roll your own web server using Medusa or Python's own
      BaseHTTPServer class.

    * You can use any of a number of Python-based templating packages to
      generate HTML on the fly (Quixote comes to mind).

    * There are two or three Apache modules that allow you to embed a Python
      interpreter into Apache.

    * You can use Jython to develop Java *-lets.

    * You can install applications like Mailman that provide significant new
      functionality (mailing list management in Mailman's case).

    * If you're crazy enough you could probably also use Perl's
      Inline::Python package to embed Python code into Apache+mod_perl
      environments... ;-) 

choose-your-poison-ly, y'rs,

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com - http://www.mojam.com/)