Dynamic web pages! not Dynamic HTML

[Brent Fulgham]

> [Sunil Hadap]
> > I am really dumb in databases and perl. I am good at python and it's
> > my scripting language for whatever I do in graphics. I want to start
> > doing my homepage which is inspired from
> > 
> > http://www.photo.net/photo/
> > 
> [snip] 
> > 
> > I want to do this in Python. Is zope useful for this, I 
> > don't want to learn a big system as I only want few specific 
> > functions only. Which free database?
> 

Sunil,

The photo.net site is based on a product called the ACS.  It's based on
the open-source AOLserver running in conjunction with an Oracle RDBMS.
It runs on "big iron" and is in nearly all respects beyond the resources
of the average joe for a "live" site because Oracle licenses are so
costly.  The ACS software, however, is GPL'd and can be downloaded from
http://arsdigita.com.

For us mortals, a port of the ACS to run on the PostgreSQL database has 
been accomplished.  See http://acspg.benadida.com.  I have some preliminary
debian packages to set up a skeleton system, which I can make available
if anyone cares.

The only problem with the ACS-pg is that you still need to do your
scripting in Tcl.

So, Titus Brown and I have successfully embedded Python in the AOLserver.
See our project at http://pywx.sourceforge.net.  It is now actually
semi-stable for simple CGI-style operations, and provides a 4-5x speedup
over the straight CGI.

Titus has gotten most of the database-related Tcl functions from the
AOLserver
Tcl API ported to Python.  I'm working on a few others.  Eventually we'll
get them all, but for now it's still a bit limited.

Our near-term goal is to provide access to the ACS and AOLserver through
Python so extensions can be made to a "skeleton" ACS without having to
expend a lot of effort learning Tcl.

Thanks,

-Brent