Pythonic way of web-programming

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 02:30:49 +0100, 
	Andy Robinson <andy at reportlab.com> wrote:
> Second, it has always seemed to me that there is a very well
> understood model of a web app consisting of a controller, Request,
> Response and a few other things, handled in very similar ways by Java
> servlets, ASP and WebKit.  

I've speculated about adding a standard HTTP{Request,Response} type to the
standard library, but even this seems unlikely because I doubt we can agree
on what should be in it, or what naming convention to use.  (Quixote uses
underscore_names, WebWare uses camelCase; whose users have to change all
their code.)

There's also the inflexibility that comes with putting something in the
standard library; the interfaces can't be changed without breaking existing
users, so it's impossible to fix things.  cgi.py has lots of cruft in it,
but I've never tried to clean it up because I have no idea what applications
out there might be broken, so cgi.py stays crufty.  It's noteworthy that
Quixote's upload handling only got really reliable when Greg Ward wrote his
own upload parsing code and jettisoned use of cgi.py's code.

All this talk of unifying Web frameworks strikes me as pointless.  Different
toolkits have different design principles and different goals; hoping for a
unified one is like hoping Python and Perl will settle their differences and
merge.  The most to hope for is that some of the systems will die out,
leaving two or three more major ones in control of the space. The best we
can do now is to make it easier for users to choose which toolkit to use by
documenting them and comparing their differences.

--amk                                                    (www.amk.ca)
LEAR: I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning.
      -- _King Lear_, III, ii