Python Paste, often simply called paste, is a set of

utilities A public utility company (usually just utility) is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service (often also providing a service using that infrastructure). Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and r ...

for

web development Web development is the work involved in developing a website for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing a simple single static page of plain text to complex web applications, ...

in Python. Paste has been described as "a framework for

web framework A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build a ...

s". The Python Paste package contains Python modules that help in implementing WSGI middleware. The package includes a WSGI wrapper for CGI applications. It also includes a simple webserver that can produce WSGI requests.

WSGI middleware

The WSGI standard is an interface that allows applications to use Python code to handle HTTP requests. A WSGI application is passed a Python representation of an HTTP request by an application, and returns content which will normally eventually be rendered by a web browser. A common use for this is when a

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

serves content created by Python code. There are, however, other uses: WSGI middleware is Python code that receives a WSGI request and then performs logic based upon this request, before passing the request on to a WSGI application or more WSGI middleware. WSGI middleware appears to an application as a server, and to the server as an application. This is analogous to the function of pipes on Unix systems. Functionality provided by WSGI middleware may include authentication, logging,

URL redirection URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened. ...

, creation of sessions, and compression. Paste helps in developing such WSGI middleware systems. For example, it is used in the Pylons web application framework.

Subcomponents of Paste

Paste has been a long-running open source project, dating from at least 2005. As it has grown, it has unbundled several other utilities from the Paste core. These utilities are part of the Paste project, but form their own packages and have their own version numbers. They include: * Paste Deploy is a system for finding and configuring WSGI applications and servers. * Paste Script, ScriptType, INITools, Tempita, WaitForIt, WPHP, WSGIFilter, and WSGIProxy are other notable bundles. * WebTest * WebOb is a wrapper around the WSGI environment. WebTest and WebOb have migrated and are now part of the Pylons project.

References

External links

* {{Web server software Python (programming language) web frameworks

WSGI middleware

Subcomponents of Paste

See also

References

External links