Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. Web Programming

Introduction

Credit: Andy McKay

The Web has been a key technology for many years now, and it has become unusual to develop an application that doesn’t involve some aspects of the Web. From showing a help file in a browser to using web services, the Web has become an integral part of most applications.

I came to Python through a rather tortuous path of ASP (Active Server Pages), then Perl, some Zope, and then Python. Looking back, it seems strange that I didn’t find Python earlier, but the dominance of Perl and ASP (and later PHP) in this area makes it difficult for new developers to see the advantages of Python shining through all the other languages.

Unsurprisingly, Python is an excellent language for web development, and, as a batteries included language, Python comes with most of the modules you need. The relatively recent inclusion of xmlrpclib in the Python Standard Library is a reassuring indication that batteries continue to be added as the march of technology requires, making the standard libraries even more useful. One of the modules I often use is urllib, which demonstrates the power of a simple, well-designed module—saving a file from the Web in two lines (using urlretrieve) is easy. The cgi module is another example of a module that has enough functionality to work with, but not too much to make your scripts slow and bloated.

Compared to other languages, Python seems to have an unusually large number of application servers and templating languages. ...