Next Stop: Code&toc - Python

Working with web services, using the tools and facilities that come with Python, is outlined in this first of three part series by Mike and Uche.

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By: Mike Olson and Uche Ogbuji

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July 29, 2003

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TOOLS YOU CAN USE

Hopefully these resources get you started. Practice if you can because from now on it will be mostly real-world code solving real-world problems. In the next few articles in this column, we shall develop a practical Web service: a software library service. You shall see how to put to work many of the tools we have introduced in this article.

Resources

Participate in the discussion forum on this article.
Get an overview of the purpose of this series by reading the second installment.
Read the third installment of this series.
Our fellow Web services columnist Graham Glass has an excellent overview of Web services in his article "The Web services (r)evolution, Part 1."
Python is a popular general purpose, application-development language famed for its readability, sensible design, and comprehensive standard library.
There are many online Python introductions and tutorials. IBM developerWorks has published Python 101 by Evelyn Mitchell. There is also Python Programming for Beginners on Linux Journal. The Python documentation comes with a tutorial. Josh Cogliati's tutorial is also a very gentle introduction.
The Vaults of Parnassus is an on-line database of openly available software for Python.
The faqts Python knowledgebase is a good place to get answers to all sorts of questions about Python.
In some of David Mertz's developerWorks columns he covers XML processing in Python. See
The Python XML SIG develops the PyXML package, which beefs up Python's native XML support.
Sean McGrath's Pyxie provides XML parsing and processing tools, generally using a line-oriented approach that is quite developer friendly. Mr. McGrath is also author of the book XML Processing with Python, published by Prentice-Hall, February 2000 (ISBN: 0130211192).
4Suite and 4Suite Server, co-developed by the authors, implement many XML-related technologies.
soaplib is Pythonware's SOAP implementation. Windows users can ease into SOAP by using Andrew Dalke's Lye, a COM to SOAP converter. Another SOAP implementation is Ken MacLeod's Scarab project.
James Tauber's Redfoot project is a Python-based framework for RDF servers.
Robin Friedrich's HTMLGen provides a template-based approach to rendering HTML documents.
Zope, by Digital Creations, is a general purpose application server for Python, and provides a variety of Web services features.
Chuck Esterbrook's Webware provides a set of Web development tools that will be familiar to users of ASP, Java servlets, JSP and the like.