[Python-Dev] [Web-SIG] Adding wsgiref to stdlib (original) (raw)

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Fri Apr 28 21:32:35 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

PEP 333 specifies WSGI, the Python Web Server Gateway Interface v1.0; it's written by Phillip Eby who put a lot of effort in it to make it acceptable to very diverse web frameworks. The PEP has been well received by web framework makers and users.

As a supplement to the PEP, Phillip has written a reference implementation, "wsgiref". I don't know how many people have used wsgiref; I'm using it myself for an intranet webserver and am very happy with it. (I'm asking Phillip to post the URL for the current source; searching for it produces multiple repositories.) I believe that it would be a good idea to add wsgiref to the stdlib, after some minor cleanups such as removing the extra blank lines that Phillip puts in his code. Having standard library support will remove the last reason web framework developers might have to resist adopting WSGI, and the resulting standardization will help web framework users.

I'd like to include paste.lint with that as well (as wsgiref.lint or whatever). Since the last discussion I enumerated in the docstring all the checks it does. There's still some outstanding issues, mostly where I'm not sure if it is too restrictive (marked with @@ in the source). It's at:

http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/trunk/paste/lint.py

I think another useful addition would be some prefix-based dispatcher, similar to paste.urlmap (but probably a bit simpler): http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/trunk/paste/urlmap.py

The motivation there is to give people the basic tools to simple multi-application hosting, and in the process implicitly suggest how other dispatching can be done. I think this is something that doesn't occur to people naturally, and they see it as a flaw in the server (that the server doesn't have a dispatching feature), and the result is either frustration, griping, or bad kludges. By including a basic implementation of WSGI-based dispatching the standard library can lead people in the right direction for more sophisticated dispatching.

And prefix dispatching is also quite useful on its own, it's not just educational.

Last time this was brought up there were feature requests and discussion on how "industrial strength" the webserver in wsgiref ought to be but nothing like the flamefest that setuptools caused (no comments please).

No one disagreed with the basic premise though, just some questions about the particulars of the server. I think there were at least a couple small suggestions for the wsgiref server; in particular maybe a slight refactoring to make it easier to use with https.

-- Ian Bicking / ianb at colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org

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