Programming Python, 3rd Edition

And Other Cool Stuff

The Web and the Internet it runs on are large, dynamic domains, and we haven’t done justice to all the available tools they offer to Python programmers. To wrap up, the following is a list of some of the more popular, full-featured, and Python-friendly web tools that are freely available on the Net. This list is incomplete and is prone to change over time too, but by way of introduction, here are some of the things Python people use today:

Medusa, asyncore

The Medusa system is an architecture for building long-running, high-performance network servers in Python, and it is used in several mission-critical systems. Beginning in Python 1.5.2, the core of Medusa became standard in Python, in the form of the asyncore and asynchat library modules. These standard modules may be used by themselves to build high-performance network servers, based on an asynchronous, multiplexing, and single-process model. They use an event loop built using the select system call presented in Chapter 13 of this book to provide concurrency without spawning threads or processes, and are well suited to handling short-lived transactions. See the Python library for details. The complete Medusa system (not shipped with Python) also provides precoded HTTP and FTP servers; it is free for noncommercial use, and it requires a license otherwise.

Twisted

The Twisted system was introduced in Chapter 13. In short, it is an asynchronous, event-driven, networking framework written in Python, with support ...