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A Piece of CherryPy for CGI Programmers
An anonymous reader writes "IBM developerWorks is running an article outlining the strengths and offering some helpful advice on the Python framework 'CherryPy'. CherryPy uses the same concepts as CGI to bind a web server to a web application, but it improves performance and gains persistence across requests by handling all its requests within a single process."
Probably... Personally I love Python, and one of the things I love is that it's still being developed. You can actually suggest something and see it implemented in the language. You can probably do that in many more, but all the others I know have been standardised. Plus it has all the other great stuff which makes it my first choice for anything.
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There are already efficient ways of using Python for web apps. FastCGI and mod_python, for example. I'd like to see benchmarks for this new one.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I think people are looking at this the wrong way. I see a lot of posts saying "who cares? ASP is already like that!" or "You're supposed to have it in a single process anyway!"
What makes this cooler is that Python functions are exposed in the URL. Read through that IBM tutorial. It's fairly interesting. Put a function called hello() in your CherryPy application, and the return value of that function is displayed in your web browser when you visit http://address/hello
I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty cool. You could definitely do some interesting stuff with this, and I can see it saving a lot of time in the code-writing phase. And once you get your head wrapped around that concept pretty well, the design phase would probably get a lot shorter too. (Not to mention how much easier it would then become to add new features to the application.)
This is interesting for two reasons: Python frameworks are now catching up to things like ASP and PHP, but are doing some crucial things differently that might make it much easier/more powerful. I might start using this instead of PHP for small web apps that just need to talk to a database, and see how it goes from there.
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Python is a great language, but my worry is about security. I would think that given the previously mentioned cool features, this app would have more security worries than your average all-in-the-same-process cgi extenders.
It says "All it does is connect the Web server to your Python code with as little fuss as possible. It doesn't make decisions about what other tools to use, ..."
And then in the very next paragraph, it says: "Instead of relying on Apache or another Web server, CherryPy runs its own small Python-based Web server."
No, no, no!
I love CherryPy as a way of routing requests to Python objects and functions. Rock on!
But look, I'm running like 20 wiki and 5 custom web apps and a few WordPress installations on my server.
And they are all plugged into Apache.
So, actually, in fact, CherryPy has now made some decisions about what tools I'm supposed to use.
Sure, I can forward requests from Apache to the CherryPy server, but that is yet another hassle, it is yet another thing to support and maintain and think about.
I wish instead that the CherryPy dev's had made it so there were multiple adapters to the CherryPy system.
All that said:
CherryPy is my favorite system for doing web apps in Python. I've used it, I've loved it, it's great. It does make programming WebApps "fun," which is perverse. So, it's succeeded.
But I strongly dislike how I have to do this funny Apache business to get it to run on port 80, or I have to give people weird 8080 addresses, like you saw in the article.
Another thing I dislike, is that it's kind of tricky to get it to do XML-RPC, in my experience. (Then again, that was 3 months ago. Perhaps things have changed now.)
(I just use AutoXmlRpcServer or AutoXmlRpcCgi for when it's XML-RPC alone, without a web side along with it.)
But again: CherryPy is my favorite, when there is no XML-RPC aspect, and when I don't mind the weird config stuff I have to do to get it to cooperate with Apache.
Actually I think CherryPy and Zope have been around a while before Ruby on Rails. And speed wise Python kicks Ruby's ass for now.
And actually I don't know of any java frameworks that don't require tons o' xml flinging to get up and running. Please feel free to enlighten me.
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CherryPy is nothing like ASP, ASP.NET. The script you write is EVERYTHING. You don't need a web server like you do in ASP/ASP.NET. It is the web server with your code in it. I have been using CherryPy for a while. What is nice about it is that for simple things, it justs steps out of the way. There is very little framework code in my apps and they just feel like console programs.
I find CherryPy's URL traversal scheme a bit clunky -- since you connect up objects to each other via attributes, you can't see the hierarchy of your site. At least with PHP you can use "ls" to discover what your URL space looks like. Django uses a really neat scheme that binds a table of named regular expressions to callable handlers, e.g.
(r'^polls/(?P<poll_id>\d+)/$', 'myproject.apps.polls.views.polls.detail')
and the handler is declared as
def detail(request, poll_id)
...
-Brendan