On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 2:07 PM, <villasc...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello all! Just started getting into Python, and am very excited about the > prospect. > > I am struggling on some general concepts. My past experience with > server-side code is mostly limited to PHP and websites. I have some file > called "whatever.php", the browser accesses it, and PHP parses it and returns > HTML, JSON, etc. Every now and then, I need to run some background PHP > script, or have some PHP script initiated by a CRON job, or have some PHP > script initiated by the command line running in an endless loop, and while it > works, feel other languages might be more appropriate. > > So, my interest in Python... > > I've read up on Python, and while some aspects seem similar to PHP, some > don't. I have learned how to create Python script, have run it from the > command line, and have even accessed it with Apache by placing > http://example.com/myscript.py in the browser. I am used to seeing .php > extensions, but never .py extentions, and even visited multiple sites which I > knew were written in Python, but never saw the browser expose the .py > extensions. I am obviously missing something. > > Why don't I see the .py extension in my browser?
PHP tends to be served like CGI, which is that the URL mirrors the path to a script that lives under a particular directory, which the webserver locates and executes. This has some downsides: * It exposes details about the structure of your server to the public, which is considered a security weakness. * An improperly configured webserver might accidentally serve scripts or other files that are not intended to be served over the web, which is a much bigger security risk. * It's inflexible; if you move your script, then the URL must necessarily change as well. With Python, it's more usual to have a greater abstraction between URLs and code. A set of URLs are mapped to a single Python gateway, and the gateway dispatches the request to the appropriate request handler. With this scheme there is no reason to have .py extensions in the URLs because the URL structure is unrelated to how the actual scripts are organized in the file system. This also makes it easier to create meaningful URLs: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
