Programming Python, 3rd Edition

Step 6: Adding a Web Interface

GUI interfaces are easier to use than command lines and are often all we need to simplify access to data. By making our database available on the Web, we can open it up to even wider use. Anyone with Internet access and a web browser can access the data, regardless of where they are located and which machine they are using. Anything from workstations to cell phones will suffice. Moreover, web-based interfaces require only a web browser; there is no need to install Python to access the data except on the single-server machine. Although web-based approaches may sacrifice some of the utility and speed of in-process GUI toolkits, their portability gain can be compelling.

As we’ll also see later in this book, there are a variety of ways to go about scripting interactive web pages of the sort we’ll need in order to access our data. Basic CGI scripting is more than adequate for simple tasks like ours. For more advanced applications, toolkits and frameworks such as Zope, Plone, Twisted, CherryPy, Webware, Django, TurboGears, mod_python, and Quixote can provide tools that we would otherwise need to code from scratch. Zope, for instance, simplifies many CGI scripting tasks and provides for security, load balancing on the server, and more. For now, let’s keep things simple and code a CGI script.

CGI Basics

CGI scripting in Python is easy as long as you already have a handle on things like HTML forms, URLs, and the client/server model of the Web (all topics we’ll ...