On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 01:37:25PM -0500, Graham Fawcett wrote:
> Just a quick update on the async HTTP server.

[snip]
> It turns out that his code is HTTP/1.0 only (should have realized that,
> since he based it on BaseHTTPRequestHandler which is explicitly
> HTTP/1.0).

[snip]
> It may turn out that a better way to get ourselves an async HTTP server
> is to strip down the Medusa package to a bare-bones dispatacher/HTTP 1.1
> request handler combo. I'm a little hesitant about this, though, having
> never really grasped all the intricacies of Medusa's design. However, if
> we can do it and stay small (1-2 source files), then Bob's your uncle.

Why not just include Medusa, even un-stripped-down as a
sub-directory in the Quixote installation?  The distribution of
Medusa that I down-loaded (medusa-0.5.4.tar.gz) was just 108K.  No
one complains about that kind of size anymore.

Are there any problems with Medusa for this use?  Does Medusa support
HTTP 1.1 completely?

It would be useful to add a bit of additional documentation in
doc/web-server.html including a sample start-up script. The qxdemo
already has a sample script (qxdemo-0.1/scripts/links-server.py).
If the documentation included "three steps for running Quixote with
Medusa", wouldn't that satisfy the requirement for "A Medusa-like
out-of-the-box server included with Quixote".  After all, Medusa is
very Medusa-like.

Even if one of the "three steps" were to down-load Medusa
separately and unroll it, that does not seem to be much of a burden
to me, especially if Medusa was available at the Quixote site.

I was able to set up and use Quixote with Medusa.  That's about as
good a test of ease-of-use as you can get.

Another benefit -- Medusa has been tested rather thoroughly.
You want it to be "out-of-the-box", but you also want it to be as
close to industrial strength as possible.

And that also solves the licensing problem.  From another recent
message:

    "The Medusa license is also the Python license, so no problem
    there."

But, it would be polite, of course, to ask Sam Rushing about doing
this.

Dave

--
Dave Kuhlman
dkuhlman@rexx.com
http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman