confused with cgi... cherrypy, fastcgi, none, etc?

hey guys what's up...

i'm building a web accessible cataloging system, and i'm trying to use python for its cgi capabilities. i don't expect this system to be very high traffic at all, because it's only going to be used by the different departments here, mainly.

anyhow, i ran into cherrypy and zope and fastcgi while doing my research for python cgi online, and now i'm not sure what to think.

the server that i will *eventually* be given an account on is an IIS server.

zope seems a little overkill for my purposes. cherrypy and fastcgi seem really cool, but the instructions on using them are pretty esoteric to me.

what i want to know is, will i need to use something other than python's native cgi module to accomplish my task (ie cherrypy, etc)? i'm aware of cgi's slowness, i'm not sure if cherrypy will add to the slowness (although i think fastcgi is incorporated with cherrypy?)...

also, how hard is it exactly to implement fastcgi with python? there are so many puzzle pieces to put together just for a freakin' cgi script to run (well)!

thanks guys

You can use just cgi to build your catalog system, but you will probably need a database module too, like one of these.


Since you will be deploying your program on an IIS server, you can also use ASP.

You can run Cherrypy as it's own server, so it has none of cgi's slownesses, except if you run Cherrypy behind IIS/Apache and activate your Cherrypy program with a cgi-script. How to run a CherryPy server behind Apache
explains this. I will guess that most of that page applies to IIS too.

i'll need a database module?? haha this is getting more and more complicated... i was thinking of just unpickling (with cPickle, of course) dictionaries when i needed to =/

ilves, from what you've said i gather that cherrypy is faster than python's native cgi, am i correct? also, would i be wrong if i were to assume from your post that i could run cgi scripts through cherrypy?

i ask the last question because i've been looking up cherrypy here and there, but it all seems to point to something like support for a templating language and embedding python code within html. i appreciate your help and suggestions very much, btw.

You can use pickles, I just find it easier to work with SQL databases when the problem is not really simple.

I only know a little about Cherrypy, but since Cherrypy doesn't need to start the Python interpreter for each request it should be significantly faster than cgi.

I doubt you can run cgi scripts through Cherrypy, that's not what Cherrypy was created for.