[Web-SIG] Defining a standard interface for common web tasks

[David Fraser]

Thijs van der Vossen wrote:

>On Friday 24 October 2003 09:33, David Fraser wrote:
>  
>
>>>I'm not sure that we should be arguing to include something that depends
>>>on a specific environment like Apache in the standard library. We should
>>>certainly be trying to promote a standard of some sort, however, which
>>>seems to conflict.
>>>
>>>I see the parallel more as being with the DB API - there are Oracle
>>>modules and ODBC modules (which are cross-engine) and SQL Server modules
>>>and so on. What we need is something to provide closely similar
>>>interfaces to different web server engines - whether those engines are
>>>in pure Python or external components.
>>>      
>>>
>>Agreed. What I'm saying isn't that mod_python should be put in the
>>standard library, but that the design of the web server API should be
>>carefully done so that it doesn't require major changes to mod_python etc.
>>    
>>
>Mod_python is probably _not_ a good starting point for a generic web server 
>API because it's purpose is to directly expose the Apache API. It makes no 
>sense to model a generic interface on a mostly direct mapping to the 
>internals of _one_ specific server.
>  
>
I'm not saying that the interface should be modelled on mod_python. But 
that mod_python is an important thing to consider when designing the 
interface.
Apache is the most popular web server on the web.
What this means is, if a Python Web API is designed that requires lots 
of unintuitive code for a mod_python implementation, it's badly designed

David