Masthead

URL

http://skunkweb.sf.net

version

3.3 (Date(2002-08-16T00:00:00))

licence

[http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html GPL] - SkunkWeb is open source (more specifically "free software").

platforms

SkunkWeb works on UNIX platforms, or on Windows with the Cygwin environment (the latter is not a supported platform, however).

Python versions

2.1.1 and later

Deployment Platforms

• Integrated with the Apache Web server using the mod_skunkweb adapter, fcgi, scgi, or a CGI program which communicates with the SkunkWeb environment. Other webservers that support fcgi, scgi or cgi should also work.

• SkunkWeb can be run as a standalone http server instead, removing the need for Apache.

• The SkunkWeb environment is provided by long-running processes.

Suitability

The requirement for Web server adapter integration, or the running of a standalone server, rules SkunkWeb out for more limited hosting environments. However, where such deployment is possible, the performance should be satisfactory, given that this is clearly a priority of the developers.

Development Interfaces

• Presentation-oriented - one of the stated benefits of SkunkWeb is the STML template language, which is extendable with Python-based components. New in 3.3 is that there is now a PSP templating language also.

• It is easy to extend the server with custom services that affect how requests are handled.

Environment Access

• SkunkWeb uses plain text configuration files to specify resource locations.

• Additional functionality could be included in SkunkWeb applications using the Python module system - service components could import modules to access such functionality.

Session, Identification and Authentication

• SkunkWeb supports sessions, with both filesystem and SQL-based database system stores being provided; their use is entirely optional.

• Cookie and basic authentication support is provided, and the authentication system is easily extensible.

Persistence Support

• SkunkWeb supports the ["PyDO"] object-relational mapper.

• Database connections for ["PostgreSQL"], ["MySQL"] and ["Oracle"] can be cached (not pooled).

• SkunkWeb has a well-considered and high-performance caching system that is easily controllable on a per-component basis.

Presentation Support

• ["STML"] - a template language which uses special tags in order to control the final Web page output, and calls components written in Python or ["STML"] that can either write output or return Python data. Top-level documents can also be written in Python.

• Python Server Pages - a PythonInWebPage presentation technology supplied with SkunkWeb (as of version 3.3)

Comments

The SkunkWeb archive package contains formatted documentation (HTML, PostScript, PDF and DVI); the latest version can always be downloaded, from http://skunkweb.sourceforge.net/. The installation process is somewhat more involved than with other packages, but should be straightforward enough to anyone used to installing GNU autoconf-based packages.

The SkunkWeb developers emphasise performance and give caching, process forking and template precompilation as features which differentiate SkunkWeb from other frameworks and application servers; internationalisation using message catalogues is another feature which other frameworks do not provide or emphasise highly. Unlike many Python-based frameworks, SkunkWeb is licensed under the GPL and this may influence community participation in the enhancement of the framework - it is not appropriate to judge the licence choice in this document, however. See http://skunkweb.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html#sec10 as to why this was done and how it affects you (in short, it probably doesn't).

• -- PaulBoddie