Chapter 24. Network, web, and database programming
This chapter covers
- Accessing databases in Python
- Network programming in Python
- Creating Python web applications
- Writing a sample project: creating a message wall
By this point, we’ve surveyed a lot of what Python can do. The final area to examine is one of the most important: using Python to build web applications that serve dynamic content. Many libraries and frameworks for creating web applications are available, in many languages—Java, PHP, Perl, and Ruby to name a few. As web applications continue to evolve and increase in importance, Python’s role in this space continues to grow.
Dynamic web applications typically store their content in databases and use the results of queries on those databases to generate page content dynamically. Various templating libraries and application frameworks are commonly used to handle URLs and format content. In this chapter, we’ll look at the pieces of this process using simple examples. When you see how the pieces fit together in Python, using almost any combination of database and application framework is possible.