Summary
Hopefully this isn't as controversial as adding setuptools. :-) Comments to python-dev and/or web-sig at python dot org, please.

PEP 333 specifies WSGI, the Python Web Server Gateway Interface v1.0; it's written by Phillip Eby who put a lot of effort in it to make it acceptable to very diverse web frameworks. The PEP has been well received by web framework makers and users.

As a supplement to the PEP, Phillip has written a reference implementation, wsgiref. I don't know how many people have used wsgiref; I'm using it myself for an intranet webserver and am very happy with it.

I believe that it would be a good idea to add wsgiref to the Python standard library, after some minor cleanups such as removing the extra blank lines that Phillip puts in his code. Having standard library support will remove the last reason web framework developers might have to resist adopting WSGI, and the resulting standardization will help web framework users.

Last time this was brought up there were feature requests and discussion on how "industrial strength" the webserver in wsgiref ought to be but nothing like the flamefest that setuptools caused (no comments please).

I'm inviting people to discuss the addition of wsgiref to the standard library. I'd like the discussion to be finished before Python 2.5a3 goes out; technically it can go in up till the 2.5b1 code freeze, but I don't really want to push it that close. I'd like the focus of the discussion to be "what are the risks of adding wsgiref to the stdlib"; not "what could we think of that's even better". Achieving a perfect decision is not the goal; having general consensus that adding it is better than not adding is would be good. Pointing out specific bugs in wsgiref and suggesting how they ought to be fixed is also welcome.

PS. To get wsgiref via anonymous SVN: svn://svn.eby-sarna.com/svnroot/wsgiref

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About the Blogger

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit. He moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1995, where he met his wife. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).