Seems to me that mod_python isn't really suitable for a shared-hosting environment because of the need to restart the server when indirectly-imported modules are updated, a situation that I believe mod_python does not detect.Peter Hunt wrote:
Actually, I think a mod_wsgi for Apache and IIS would be one of _the_ most important things for WSGI. I think that it would search for a __wsgi__.py file (or maybe something with a better name) which would expose a WSGI application named "application" that would handle requests for the directory in which it exists. This would allow a user to simply drop a file on the webserver and have it work. It would be excellent for shared hosting solutions.
Would it? From what I can tell, mod_php is very popular in shared hosts, but neither mod_python nor mod_perl are. I don't think mod_* makes it necessarily host-friendly. But from what I can tell of mod_python, it would be relatively easy to have something like .wsgi files, and give them a handler that runs them as WSGI apps.
I can imagine a good setup for hosts being one based on forking per-user processes, which is adaptive primarily to scale down -- e.g., a largely dorman app could have 1 or even 0 processes running (at 0 it becomes similar to CGI, but presumably the process would stay around for some time to respond to subsequent requests). The "scaling down" scenario I often think about would be a email contact form -- one of those things that has to be an app, can be implemented and deployed separately from other aspects of the site, and yet it's clear waste of resources to keep a process always around to respond to such requests. Though it's actually someplace where CGI would work just fine; but lets say you don't want to educate the developer about when they might want to use other deployment strategies (which is a rather complex discussion really, that would be better avoided by providing one really good strategy and telling everyone to use it).
Maybe mod_python is appropriate for that kind of situation, I'm not sure. It could also be implemented with a second, single process that was developed and deployed separately from Apache.
As for IIS and ISAPI, I can't say I really know what the archicture of that system is, so I don't know. Oh, but that does remind me of another WSGI server: ASP. Though I remember vaguely this came up before and it seemed infeasible because ASP didn't support anything like PATH_INFO. Oh well, I can't remember now.
This would cause all other hosted sites' sessions to be forcibly terminated without some persistent-state mechanism that can't be guaranteed to be present for all sites, and of course most hosting companies aren't willing to have their customers say when shared-hosting servers are restarted.
For these reasons I've never pestered any of our service providers to support mod_python even though I have done quite a bit of experimental work with it and really quite like that environment.
regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 703 861 4237 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ Python Web Programming http://pydish.holdenweb.com/ _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
