The Python Web Services Developer: Part 2

In the first installment of the "Python Web services developer" column, we promised we'd show you lots of code. Unfortunately, when using Python out of the box, and many of the third party applications available in Python for Web services development, there is often little code to write.

This is the case in this month's column as we put together an on-line information directory. The purpose of this directory is making software packages available for download. It supports real-time updating of the data and metadata about the software packages, searching the meta-data about the packages, and, of course, downloading the packages themselves.

Before continuing with this article, you should make sure you have an understanding of some of the technologies we will be talking about in this column. The technologies we will be using include Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), XML Path Language (XPath), and the Resource Description Framework (RDF).