How do I use python for web development without relying on a framework?

Question

I know the various frameworks have their benefits, but I personally want my web development in python to be as straight-forward as possible: less writing to the framework, more writing python.

The only thing I have found so far that lets me do this in the most obvious way possible is web.py but I have slight concerns on its performance.

For those of you using nginx(or another flavour)+mod_wsgi+web.py... how's performance? Can it be improved further?

For those of you who have used web.py, liked the idea and went on to write something better or found something better... care to point me to the source?

I'd like to hear about all the conspicuous, minimal yet powerful approaches.

Answer 1

The way to go is wsgi.

WSGI is the Web Server Gateway Interface. It is a specification for web servers and application servers to communicate with web applications (though it can also be used for more than that). It is a Python standard, described in detail in PEP 333.

All current frameworks support wsgi. A lot of webservers support it also (apache included, through mod_wsgi). It is the way to go if you want to write your own framework.

Here is hello world, written to wsgi directly:

def application(environ, start_response):
    status = '200 OK'
    response_headers = [('Content-type','text/plain')]
    start_response(status, response_headers)
    return ['Hello world!\n']

Put this in a file.py, point your mod_wsgi apache configuration to it, and it will run. Pure python. No imports. Just a python function.

If you are really writing your own framework, you could check werkzeug. It is not a framework, but a simple collection of various utilities for WSGI applications and has become one of the most advanced WSGI utility modules. It includes a powerful debugger, full featured request and response objects, HTTP utilities to handle entity tags, cache control headers, HTTP dates, cookie handling, file uploads, a powerful URL routing system and a bunch of community contributed addon modules. Takes the boring part out of your hands.