Howdy all, I'm trying to implement some new functionality for an existing PHP web application. Rather than writing a whole lot of stuff in PHP, and looking toward a future when more of the application can be rewritten more sanely, I'd like to write a Python program that generates the content and serves it up to the existing application via HTTP.
The existing architecture is as expected: web client <--(HTTP)--> existing app with the existing app also talking to a database. The new functionality involves generating a PDF document from input parameters and returning it to the browser. Rather than nestle this into the existing PHP, I'd like the existing app to simply make an HTTP request to a single-purpose application server written in Python which generates the content and serves it back as the response body. This would insert into the above architecture behind the existing application: existing app <--(HTTP)--> request server <--(WSGI)--> content generator The bulk of the new functionality would be in the generation of the content from the input parameters. The request server would run locally on the machine, listening for HTTP requests and invoking the content generator via WSGI; the generated document would simply be served back as the HTTP response body. The existing application would then just need to gather the input parameters needed, feed them in an HTTP request to the request server, and feed back the response to the web client. I can see how writing the content generator to talk WSGI would be beneficial: the application can be re-used in other application contexts. The WSGI protocol is easy to follow. What I can't find is a simple recipe to serve a WSGI application with a dumb-as-rocks HTTP server, just using the standard Python library. The standard library includes BaseHTTPServer, which as far as I can tell doesn't know anything about WSGI. The don't seem to be any recipes posted to the Python Cookbook <URL:http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Python/Cookbook/> with "wsgi" in them. Everything else that I can find leads to dependencies I don't want for flexibility I don't need: cherrypy, paste, et al. Any suggestions for how to serve up a simple WSGI application with just the standard library? -- \ "A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for | `\ a coffin." -- Henry L. Mencken | _o__) | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
