24.3. Creating a Python web application

Although the http.server module has the basics of a web server, you need more than the basics to write a full-featured web application. You need to manage users, authentication, and sessions; you need a way to generate HTML pages. The solution to this is to use a web framework, and over the years many frameworks have been created in Python, leading to the present generation, which includes Zope and Plone, Django, TurboGears, web2py, and many more.

One thing to keep in mind in considering web applications is that the web server functionality—the part that processes HTTP requests and returns responses—isn’t necessarily (or even usually) closely tied to the web application itself. Most web frameworks today can either run their own HTTP servers or rely on an external server, depending on the situation. For development, it’s often preferred to use the application’s internal server, because there’s less to install and set up. For heavy traffic in production, often an external server handles the load better and can be tweaked as needed.