[Tutor] building a website with python

[Don Jennings]

On Apr 9, 2013, at 11:07 PM, Benjamin Fishbein wrote:

>> 
>> You've gotten some good feedback, but I suspect you will get better information if you provide more information about your goals for the site.
>> 
> 
> Thanks for your help, everyone. There are some specific things I want the site to do, and I'm not sure which would be the best developing tool or hosting for these.
> The python software I developed is for selling used books.
> It takes book ISBN numbers as input and returns the best prices being offered.
> It uses the selenium module...I'm not sure how that would translate into a website.

Checking the documentation [1], selenium will interact with a browser running remotely using the selenium-server. However, I don't imagine the latter option being viable if you plan to have any significant traffic. I would think a better plan is to forego the gui browser, perhaps re-writing the interaction with other sites using requests [2], a very nice way to work with HTTP. Do you need to interact with javascript on those pages?

> There are many websites that offer similar book price comparisons, but mine is different...it's user-friendly. Any volunteer at a thrift shop or library can use it...just a series of simple directions and yes/no questions, taking the user all the way from scanning or typing in an ISBN to dropping the parcel off at the post office. (The local libraries I worked with more than doubled their used-book revenues.) I want to expand this nationwide, and bookchicken.com seems to be the way to do it.
> So much of the program is simple enough. But there's two parts of the program that I anticipate being important to what host, development tool I use:
> 1. ISBNs (the books the thrift shop/ library has) being sent to various websites and returning the data to my site to be analyzed by my program.
> 2. Maneuvering through the website of the company buying the books. I don't want to send the user off to a warehouse's site with a list of books to sell to them. They'll still be entering their address and name, but it'll be on my site, that I then send to the warehouse's page, get a packing slip and shipping label from the warehouse, and give these documents to the user to print out.
> 
> I'm not sure if this changes anyone's ideas about which host/ developer I should use. Please let me know.

Obviously my recommendations for producing a static site missed the mark! I do think that one of the microframeworks folks have mentioned will get you up and running faster.

Take care,
Don

[1] http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.jsp
[2] http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/quickstart/