Stand Alone Python Servers

The Python programming language provides a full-featured suite of both high and low-level networking capabilities. This allows for stand-alone web servers to be written in Python. For instance, CherryPy is an object publishing framework for Python with a very powerful built-in HTTP server.

In production environments, Python is often run behind a more production-ready web server such as Apache. The main reason for doing so is performance. Web servers such as Apache are written low-level languages and thus have a raw computing advantage. They are generally mature as software packages. The have been tried and tested for much longer than most Python web servers.

Another reason may be architecture. If there are several other production services that already use Apache, then it would make sense for consistency. It is much easier to maintain a single web server than many, often very different web servers.

If one were to deploy a single Python web application with a single web server, is deploying to a production-ready HTTP server really necessary? Are the performance gains really all that noticeable in the grand end-user scheme of things? As for stability, this is the kind of thing that should be rigorously tested before even considering placing the stable label on the server to begin with.

The need for a simplified pypi package.

Given the growing complexity of many Python applications these days, developers often use other packages and libraries to help manage this complexity. TurboGears, for instance, will fetch several other packages from PyPi when it is installed and install these packages as well. PyPi provides access to packages that the Python community has provided, possibly because they feel it will be useful in a different context.

However, the PyPi code itself isn't exactly a simple Python package used to host egg files. It is a full-featured, hosted solution. The setuptools package can fetch eggs listed on a simple HTML page. In this case, you wouldn't even need anything other than Apache. However, what would be nice, is a middle-ground. A Python package that uses CherryPy or some other web framework to host the actual packages and provides a very simplistic management interface. I think something like this would be very valuable for packages that are limited by having to retrieving dependencies from PyPi and would need their own repository.

I'm not too sure how difficult this would actually by to implement, I'm only thinking of the need for such a solution at the moment. Perhaps I'll do some experimentation and write about what I find.