Python & XML

Building a Web Application

Now you can use your new knowledge of the DOM to create a simple web application. Let’s build one that allows for the posting and viewing of articles. The articles are submitted and viewed via a web browser, but stored by the web server as XML, which allows the articles to be leveraged into different information systems that process XML. HTML articles, on the other hand, are unusable outside of a web browser.

Preparing the Web Server

In order to run the examples in this chapter, you must have a web server available that lets you execute CGI scripts. These examples were designed on Apache, so the CGI scripts contain a sh-bang line that specified the path to the Python executable (the #!/usr/bin/python expression at the top of the file) so that Apache can run them just like any other CGI script. (Understanding the term "sh-bang” requires a little bit of knowledge of Unix history. The traditional command-line environment for Unix was originally implemented using the sh program. The exclamation point was named the “bang” character because it was always used after words such as “bang” and “pow” in comic books and cartoons. Since the lines at the top of scripts that started with #! were interpreted by the sh program, they came to be known as sh-bang lines.)

Ensuring the script’s execution

You must enable the execution of your Python scripts on your web server. On Apache, this means enabling CGI within the web directory, ensuring that the actual CGI scripts ...