Using Python on the WWW Guido van Rossum CNRI
Python Today OO scripting, prototyping, etc. Free, Open Source, portable, etc. large collection of useful software Active, enthousiastic community newsgroups, mailing lists, websites Python Consortium being formed several books, more under way Suitable for large projects
Personal web history
1992 Python existed and had socket code & GUI code (stdwin) First heard of WWW, used line mode browser to learn about it No mosaic yet; one graphical browser (Viola), no source code Interest piqued
First graphical web browser in Python http trivial w. Python sockets html 1.0 (?) - event-driven parser formatter - several variants line mode browser followed feedback to Marc Andreessen Python still has all these components (much evolved)
1994 I didn’t get CGI! –Mike McLay & Steve Majewski wrote first CGI module Eventually I caught up –Standard cgi module supports file upload &c
1995 I moved to CNRI Grail browser started –as demo for annotating web pages –anecdote: Bob Kahn didn’t get open source, withdrew source distribution HTML 3.2, Python applets
1999 last release of Grail (0.6) gave up against netscape & IE still useful for minority platforms URL:
Python and the web
Who uses Python on the web? Infoseek’s Ultraseek –site search engine –written in Python except for engine code Yahoo mail
Standard modules asyncore/asynchat urllib;httplib, ftplib,...; socket smtplib, nntplib,... cgi “sgmllib”, htmllib SimpleHttpServer &c
Standard tools webchecker, websucker ftpmirror
3rd party modules HTMLgen DocumentTemplate cookie module XML SIG Linbot Zope