Promoting Python as web application development language

[Paul Rubin]

list-python at ccraig.org (Christopher A. Craig) writes:
> Regardless, I think plain vanilla Python is a terrific language for
> moderately sized web based projects (maybe even large ones, but I've
> never done a really large one).  It's not that hard to write your own
> templates, and the cgi module provides an excellent interface to any
> CGI data you might need.

You can't really do a big site with CGI's.  The forking overhead will
kill you.  You need mod_python or FastCGI or some other scheme.

> I do agree, however, that the pickle/cookie problem is quite
> substantial, and that Python needs some easy way to embed complex
> objects safely in cookies to be a first class web language, though.

You really need to encrypt and authenticate anything you serialize
into cookies, so you don't leak info about the server state or let
people mess with it.  However, I'm not convinced storing complex
objects in cookies is such a great idea in the first place.  It makes
stuff like load balancing simpler, but you're limited in how much data
you can put in them.  I'd say bite the bullet and come up with a
server side session mechanism including any persistence and sharing
required.  Finally, about scalability, computers are awfully fast
these days.  If you really need load balancing, maybe your software is
just too slow and you should fix it instead of trying to throw more
hardware at it.