Chapter 15. Server-Side Scripting
“Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave”
This chapter is the fourth part of our look at Python Internet programming. In the last three chapters, we explored sockets and basic client-side programming interfaces such as FTP and email. In this chapter, our main focus will be on writing server-side scripts in Python—a type of program usually referred to as CGI scripts. Though something of a lowest common denominator for web development today, such scripts still provide a simple way to get started with implementing interactive websites in Python.
Server-side scripting and its derivatives are at the heart of much of the interaction that happens on the Web. This is true both when scripting manually with CGI and when using the higher-level frameworks that automate some of the work. Because of that, the fundamental web model we’ll explore here in the context of CGI scripting is prerequisite knowledge for programming the Web well, regardless of the tools you choose to deploy.
As we’ll see, Python is an ideal language for writing scripts to implement and customize websites, because of both its ease of use and its library support. In the following chapter, we will use the basics we learn in this chapter to implement a full-blown website. Here, our goal is to understand the fundamentals of server-side scripting, before exploring systems that deploy or build upon that basic model.
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