Python & XML

What Can We Do with It?

Now that we’ve looked at how we can use XML with Python, we need to look at how we can apply our knowledge of XML and Python to real applications. In the Internet age, this means widely distributed systems operating across the Internet.

There’s a lot to working with the Internet beyond XML and the CGI programming done in many of the examples in the book. In case you’re not already familiar with this topic, we include an introduction to the facilities in the Python standard library that help create clients and servers for the Internet in Chapter 8. We review how to retrieve data from remote servers, and how to submit form-based requests programmatically and read the result. We then learn to build custom web servers that respond to HTTP requests, allowing us to build servers that do exactly what we need them to.

With these skills under our hat, we proceed to look at the emerging world of “web services.” Chapter 9 describes what we mean by web services and introduces the specifications coming out in that area. We look at two packages that allow us to use SOAP to call on web services and demonstrate how to create one in Python.

In Chapter 10, we pull together much of what we’ve learned with an extended example that demonstrates how it all works together. Using XML as a communications medium, we are able to build an application that uses a variety of technologies and operates in diverse environments.