[Web-SIG] Standardising containment.

[Paul Boddie]

Ben Sizer wrote:
> 
> Alan Kennedy wrote:
> > The other main one that springs to mind is how WSGI applications 
> > discover the file-system path name that corresponds to an URI.
> 
> I thought that one of the major features of most of these Python web
> frameworks is that a URI doesn't map to a file but to an object or a
> function, several of which might be in one physical file. Since WSGI
> seems to be promoted as a minimal system that applies equally to
almost
> any system, I'd think that such a mapping falls entirely out of its
scope.

It probably does for WSGI, although I wonder how such issues (and the
many
others out there) can be simultaneously avoided and yet anticipated by
the
specification in order to avoid incompatibilities later on.

> I agree that it might be useful to have this functionality. I think a
> standard way to map URIs to Python files would be beneficial for
Python
> web development. I just don't see it fitting into what people here
have
> told me about WSGI.

I suppose that Alan is moving slowly up the stack. It's an interesting
issue
that existing frameworks have addressed in their own ways (the
getRealPath
that Alan mentioned, Webware's getServerSidePath, and so on), and
although
one can wonder whether application data (which the image example could
almost be considered as being) should be configured within or with
reference
to the server environment or not, if you consider having to specify the
filenames of resources within an application, it's much nicer to be able
to
make those filenames relative to some deployment variable (eg. where the
application ends up when deployed) and to keep those resources bundled
with
the application than to have to manually configure the application to
use
absolute paths before/during/after deployment.

I hope that made sense. ;-)

Paul