Re: bye bye mod_python, hello... what?

Graham Dumpleton <[email protected]> Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:33:59 +1100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.python.mod_python
Message-ID <[email protected]>
2010/1/17 Samuel Hazelett <alertmaster-/[email protected]>:
> "unfortunately, mod_python is deprecated"
>
> What does this mean: deprecated
> Why?
> Does it mean there will be no future releases of mod_python?  The "end of
> history!"
> I was just getting started.  Woe is me/us.

There has been no official statement about future of mod_python.

There is however no one actively developing it or maintaining it and
so the consensus of many is that it is a dead end. Some would say it
has been deprecated in favour of mod_wsgi, but that technically is not
true.

As is, mod_python source code tar ball releases will not compile on
latest Apache 2.2.X versions without a minor patch.

The source code also will not compile on Apache 2.3 (unstable branch
for Apache 2.4), without more substantial changes due to Apache API
changes.

Porting mod_python to Python 3.0 will be very hard and any
applications on top would also need to see substantial changes due to
the necessary changes in the API of mod_python. It is possible that
some aspects of mod_python.publisher will not be able to work the same
at all on Python 3.0 because of the removal in Python 3.0 of some
features of the language/libraries.

As such, if all you need is a way of hosting a WSGI capable Python web
application on Apache, you are better off using standard WSGI hosting
mechanisms as provided by mod_wsgi of fastcgi/flup.

If starting on a new project, you may be better off looking at some of
the WSGI frameworks. For low level stuff see Werkzeug, Paste and bobo.
For more high level, see Django, TurboGears, Pylons and Web2Py.

Graham