If Not CGI...

[Tim Chase]

> I've caught a lot of flack (imagine that) about using CGI.

The main reason is that CGI has the overhead of loading & 
unloading the Python interpreter on every request.  The other 
methods load the Python interpreter once (or a small, 
fixed-number of times), then handle lots of requests from that 
process (or pool of processes), and then optionally unload if 
server-load drops.

However CGI is old and fairly entrenched, so it's easy to find 
with cheap hosting services -- what do they care if your site is 
slow?

> I understand there are several other options, to wit:
> mod_python, fastcgi and wcgi. I've messed around with
> mod_python without luck. What are your suggestions?

Generally, one writes to a framework (Django[1], web.py[2], 
TurboGears[3], CherryPy[4], etc) that either has a 
preferred/suggested method of interface, or allows you to plug 
into [m]any of the items you list.  I know Django is happy with 
mod_python and wsgi (and I suspect fastcgi, but I'll let you 
google that).  YMMV with the others.  I've even seen an 
abomination of a hack that ran Django under CGI (whooooie, is the 
performance bad!).  I think the general direction of the Python 
web-world seems to be moving toward WSGI (and Graham Dumpleton's 
work on mod_wsgi[5]; IIUC, he was heavily involved in the initial 
mod_python) instead of mod_python.

Since you seem fairly adamant about *not* using a framework and 
cobbling together the universe from the ground up, you might look 
into Paul Boddie's "WebStack"[6] which abstracts away a number of 
the main interfaces into a common interface.  Kindly, his work 
even allows you to plug into a CGI interface since that's what 
you're familiar with, and then shift to a different interface.

-tkc


[1]
http://djangoproject.com

[2]
http://turbogears.org

[3]
http://webpy.org

[4]
http://www.cherrypy.org

[5]
http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/

[6]
http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/WebStack.html