Question

I’m totally new to Python and I’d like to start building Web pages with it (but not using a Web framework or a templating module). What are the minimum requirements? Could you suggest a simple setup?

Thank you!

EDIT: I’m not trying to be minimalist at all cost. What I’m looking for is a simple, common solution, that stays close to the language (and doesn’t impose a design paradigm, eg MVC).

Answer 1

I go with the flow, and I would recommend to use a lightweight framework.

For one, web apps expose your server to security risks, so it’s good to use something that is maintained by a more-or-less large community of developers (more eyeballs to fix vulnerabilities).

Also if you want to “stay close to the language”, you need some sort of abstraction layer to manage HTTP in a pythonic way. Python is all about high-levelness [battery included].

Some of the framework stay really close to python’s syntax, semantics and style. Take a look at webpy for example. I think this quote says much of the philosophy behind webpy:

“Django lets you write web apps in Django. TurboGears lets you write web apps in TurboGears. Web.py lets you write web apps in Python.” — Adam Atlas

Another good candidate in terms of conciseness and use of “regular” python is cherrypy. From their website:

CherryPy allows developers to build web applications in much the same way they would build any other object-oriented Python program. […] Your CherryPy powered web applications are in fact stand-alone Python applications embedding their own multi-threaded web server. You can deploy them anywhere you can run Python applications.