[Web-SIG] WSGI adoption

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:57 PM 11/25/04 -0500, Peter Hunt wrote:
>Fair enough; we can drop Zope from the priority list.
>
>I'd suggest simply using plain Python as a configuration file format.
>It's just as easy to understand and far more flexible than
>ConfigParser.

Flexibility of specifying the content isn't really a plus here.  End user 
editability, and *sectionability* are more important.  That is, it should 
be easy to have sections for the app, the web server, and general WSGI 
information.  For that matter, it should be possible for me to include 
settings for both mod_python and Twisted in the same configuration file, 
such that each one sees only the parts it cares about.  That way, an 
application developer can minimize the tuning knowledge needed by an 
application deployer, for platforms the developer cares about.

IMO, most of the content of the deployment configuration is either going to 
be constants or filenames.  For filenames, ConfigParser lets you 
interpolate variables, so if you want brevity of expression you can still 
do that without going to the full generality of Python.


>Also, in terms of configuration files, I think an instance of each
>middleware/application/gateway should get its own configuration file.

Yes, this is a per-instance deployment file I'm talking about.


>While designing this configuration system, we should keep the idea of
>shared hosting in mind, and that the host may want to run certain
>pieces of middleware for everyone.

I was thinking that part of the configuration passed to an application's 
setup would be an optional "next application" value.  There are several 
ways that could be configured from the deployment file, such as simply 
specifying the filename of the deployment file for the next application, or 
by embedding a list of deployment files for middleware to be put "above" 
the current application.

I don't have a firm proposal either way for the specific mechanism yet.