[Twisted-web] Re: Fwd: Setting up a project.

[Govind Salinas]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 12:46 PM, David Bolen <db3l.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Govind Salinas" <blix at sophiasuchtig.com> writes:
>
>> There are a few things wrong with my current approach.  One is that it
>> feels sort of like a hack the way I am doing it.  It doesn't seem like the
>> right way.  Second, since manually doing things that I normally expect
>> the web server to be doing
>
> Remember, with twisted.web, for the most part aside from pure HTTP
> processing, not much is going to happen for free without explicitly
> being coded.  There are some utility method (like for request
> sessions) and some utility modules (like static.py for file serving),
> but your code is pretty much in charge, for better or worse :-)
>
>> the web server to be doing,  I expect there are 100 things that I should
>> be doing that I am not to act like a proper server.  For instance, my
>> css pages wouldn't load so I am manually setting the content-type,
>> but *only* for css pages.  If I end up needing other types of files, I
>> will have to add that in as well.
>
> twisted.web's static.File implementation does the content type based
> on file extension, using Python's internal mimetypes module
> dictionary, some custom additions, and anything in /etc/mime.types by
> default.  You can also augment class or instance contentTypes variable
> if needed to apply your own mappings, as well as establish a default
> mapping for a file/directory for non-matching files when you
> instantiate static.File (see the favicon usage in my last post).
>
> For resources that aren't static and identifiable by file extension,
> yes, you'll need to establish the correct content type as part of your
> resource handler during request processing if it's not going to be HTML.
>
>>                                     Another example is that I am having
>> to roll my own page-not-found implementation.  Aside from setting
>> the response code to 404, I am not sure what else I need to be doing.
>
> Depends on what you want the user to see in such a case.  I don't
> think anything more than that is truly required for correct operation
> protocol wise.  The resource is still in control of what will be
> rendered, so you can use your own template, static content, etc.. in
> addition to setting the response code.
>
> twisted.web.error has some simple resources that render some plain
> text and set the appropriate HTTP response code, but yes, anything
> much above that is your responsibility.
>
> The only exception to this is if displayTracebacks is set to True (the
> default) in your Site object.  In that case, exceptions/Failures that
> reach the top level will be rendered nicely to the browser (using
> twisted.web.util.formatFailure).
>

Very helpful again.  Thanks.

>> This is not too important, I was hoping that there was a "framework" that I
>> could use that would be portable to other webservers if someone wanted
>> to do so.
>
> Sounds like you may be looking for a more extensive framework, perhaps
> with a wsgi interface.  twisted.web is largely a protocol
> implementation.

As I said, this is a nice-to-have, so I am not too worried about it.

Thanks,
Govind.