I am pleased to announce the release of PyWX version 0.6. This is an alpha release but is fairly stable and is being used in several development environments.

PyWX can be retrieved from SourceForge,

    http://download.sourceforge.net/PyWX/PyWX-0.6.tar.gz

The PyWX homepage is

    http://pywx.idyll.org

What is PyWX?

PyWX is a Python module for AOLserver.

AOLserver is a free, open-source, enterprise-class, multi-threaded web server whose performance on dynamic content is reputed to beat Apache. It is used at many large web sites including AOL and ArsDigita. It includes an internal database API that allows persistent database connections.

Python is a clean, object-oriented scripting language with excellent support for complicated data structures and great libraries for web programming.

PyWX embeds a Python interpreter into AOLserver, allowing threaded execution of Python scripts--even CGI scripts--within the server process. It also allows the Python script to access almost all of AOLserver's internal API via a C extension module. PyWX supports many other features, including

• Full access to AOLserver's Tcl interpreter from Python, and vice versa.
• Access to AOLserver's persistent database mechanism.
• Optional compiled-script caching.
• Threaded execution of CGI scripts within emulated CGI environment.
• Cross-connection data-persistence.
• An internal Webware adaptor.

What's new in version 0.6?

• SWIG-assisted wrapping of AOLserver's C API functions. Almost all of AOLserver's facilities are available to Python scripts, wrapped in an object-oriented fashion.
• More of PyWX itself is written in Python.
• Much-improved documentation.
• Significant cleanup, bug fixes, and plugging of memory leaks.
• Improved example scripts.

Version 0.6 is fairly stable and is being used in several development environments, although there are still some problems under heavy loads. As a rough measure of the performance, PyWX can deliver a trivial Python script at about 230 pages per second on a single-processor Pentium 3/500MHz under Linux.

Please check out our home page at

    http://pywx.idyll.org

for more information on PyWX, including mailing lists, development archives, and several example pages. You may also be interested in:

    http://www.aolserver.com       -- AOLserver
    http://www.python.org          -- the Python programming language
    http://webware.sourceforge.net -- Webware toolkit

Yours,

Michael

Michael Haggerty mhagger@alum.mit.edu