I'm not sure what your experience level is. If you're a beginning python/web developer it can be confusing. I'm going to assume that's the case. To others in the list, feel free to correct me if I get any of this wrong. I'm no expert.
To build a web site you need to have a web server. Most production sites use Apache with a plug-in called mod_python that allows it to execute python code and return the results. In this case, you write python routines that get called by Apache as a result of a user's request. Your python code looks at the request and returns an HTML page to Apache that then gets returned to the end user as a result of the request. If you're talking about a pure python solution, there are a number of lightweight servers written in Python. Twisted comes to mind as one of the most popular. You can write a Pyton based web server in only a few lines of Twisted code. I haven't done it but their demo and instructions are pretty impressive. These lightweight servers are great for development but are usually not used in production systems due to security issues. It's hard to write a secure server. It's much easier to just use Apache. If you're asking about how you generate HTML with Python, that's another very deep subject. You can do it directly by just using the Python string/list functions to build a big string of HTML and return it to the server. That quickly gets messy. Most people use some sort of template language. A template language lets you build the HTML in a text editor and insert coded place markers that get replaced by values you pass into the template rendering engine. There are lots of template engines available including the one built into django itself. Of course if you're working with any kind of data, you'll need an interface to a database engine. You can access a database directly through one of the many Python based ODBC libraries. I use mxODBC from egenix. It usually works best though if you have a library that lets you work with your database using object oriented python code. Libraries that do that are called ORM for Object Relational Maping. Again, django has its own but there are others, the most popular being SQLAlcemy. Even using a template engine to create a web site can get cumbersome if you're not careful to keep everything organized. That's where a web framework like django comes in. It provides a templating language, an ORM and a project structure to help you quickly get a web site up and running in a clean organized way. It also has instructions for how to tie your web application to whatever server you want. I don't know if this answers your question. But if not, feel free to ask more questions. -----Original Message----- From: django-users@googlegroups.com [mailto:django-us...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of codecub Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2010 1:28 PM To: Django users Subject: Re: how do you build an html website in python? that's really unhelpful dude, i read through that and it doesnt even help at all thats for software/applications not websites -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-us...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-us...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
