The Definitive Guide to Pylons

Chapter 16. The Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI)

The Web Server Gateway Interface is a Python standard created in 2003 by Philip J. Eby and the Python web community. Back in 2003 Python suffered from a very fragmented web framework community where applications written with code from one framework wouldn't run on the server component from a different framework. The Web Server Gateway Interface standard (known as WSGI and pronounced "wizgy" by those in the Python community) was designed to change that and enable a degree of cross-framework interoperability.

In the first part of this chapter, you'll learn how a simple WSGI application works, how you can use WSGI applications as Pylons controllers, how WSGI servers work, and how WSGI leads to new ...