Masthead
- URL
- version
3.2.3 (Date(2002-06-26T00:00:00))
- 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
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.
- 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.
In the documentation, it is noted that other presentation systems could be developed for SkunkWeb.
Comments
The SkunkWeb archive package seems to contain documentation, but it exists principally in ["LaTeX"] format and does not seem to be built by default; the latest version can always be downloaded, however, 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.
-- PaulBoddie