I've started a few threads before on object persistence in medium to high end server apps. This one is about low end apps, for example, a simple cgi on a personal web site that might get a dozen hits a day. The idea is you just want to keep a few pieces of data around that the cgi can update.
Immediately, typical strategies like using a MySQL database become too big a pain. Any kind of compiled and installed 3rd party module (e.g. Metakit) is also too big a pain. But there still has to be some kind of concurrency strategy, even if it's something like crude file locking, or else two people running the cgi simultaneously can wipe out the data store. But you don't want crashing the app to leave a lock around if you can help it. Anyway, something like dbm or shelve coupled with flock-style file locking and a version of dbmopen that automatically retries after 1 second if the file is locked would do the job nicely, plus there could be a cleanup mechanism for detecting stale locks. Is there a standard approach to something like that, or should I just code it the obvious way? Thanks. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
