[Python-Dev] [Web-SIG] Adding wsgiref to stdlib

[Ian Bicking]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> PEP 333 specifies WSGI, the Python Web Server Gateway Interface v1.0;
> it's written by Phillip Eby who put a lot of effort in it to make it
> acceptable to very diverse web frameworks. The PEP has been well
> received by web framework makers and users.
> 
> As a supplement to the PEP, Phillip has written a reference
> implementation, "wsgiref". I don't know how many people have used
> wsgiref; I'm using it myself for an intranet webserver and am very
> happy with it. (I'm asking Phillip to post the URL for the current
> source; searching for it produces multiple repositories.)
> 
> I believe that it would be a good idea to add wsgiref to the stdlib,
> after some minor cleanups such as removing the extra blank lines that
> Phillip puts in his code. Having standard library support will remove
> the last reason web framework developers might have to resist adopting
> WSGI, and the resulting standardization will help web framework users.

I'd like to include paste.lint with that as well (as wsgiref.lint or 
whatever).  Since the last discussion I enumerated in the docstring all 
the checks it does.  There's still some outstanding issues, mostly where 
I'm not sure if it is too restrictive (marked with @@ in the source). 
It's at:

   http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/trunk/paste/lint.py

I think another useful addition would be some prefix-based dispatcher, 
similar to paste.urlmap (but probably a bit simpler): 
http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/trunk/paste/urlmap.py

The motivation there is to give people the basic tools to simple 
multi-application hosting, and in the process implicitly suggest how 
other dispatching can be done.  I think this is something that doesn't 
occur to people naturally, and they see it as a flaw in the server (that 
the server doesn't have a dispatching feature), and the result is either 
frustration, griping, or bad kludges.  By including a basic 
implementation of WSGI-based dispatching the standard library can lead 
people in the right direction for more sophisticated dispatching.

And prefix dispatching is also quite useful on its own, it's not just 
educational.

> Last time this was brought up there were feature requests and
> discussion on how "industrial strength" the webserver in wsgiref ought
> to be but nothing like the flamefest that setuptools caused (no
> comments please).

No one disagreed with the basic premise though, just some questions 
about the particulars of the server.  I think there were at least a 
couple small suggestions for the wsgiref server; in particular maybe a 
slight refactoring to make it easier to use with https.


-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org