Web Development -Python!

Question

Hi am trying to learn web development using python. I have some previous experience using php but as such am a total amateur. I am using web2py after dabbling around with django,pylons,turbogears stuff etc and find myself quite productive with the framework. However I want to know what is the entire process in web development. I mean , there is a request, which triggers a response, but what is all this cache,memcache.Could someone be free enough and kind enough to let me know what all are the concepts I should learn or be familiar with.I understand XMLRPC,SOAP,AJAX, web services. It would even be great if someone could point me to some reading material.

Hope someone answers.. Thanks

Answer 1

A good practice can be if you start making a web server on your own, what you turn into an application server.

You can also learn a lot by looking at the raw data transport (Wireshark is an awesome tool for this).

It might be a good idea to make a basic page in a framework (say Django), make a request, and go through every line with a debugger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patterns (read about Chain of responsibility, lot of web frameworks uses that pattern to dispatch the request).

For caching and memcached, read the wikipedia article. You can also learn about the HTTP protocol itself.

Answer 2

You can look into the WSGI specifications, it would also be nice to look at werkzeug which handles the WSGI. Their documentation tells very clearly what happens where.

WSGI is the most commonly used way for interfacing Python applications with a webserver.

What Yorirou suggests is even more low level, dealing with the basics of HTTP packets and how browsers work on caching. For that you can read the Wikipedia page on the HTTP protocol.

For the caching part, you have to remember that browser cache, webserver cache and application cache are all totally different beasts :-)