Section 17.8. CGI Script Trade-Offs


17.8. CGI Script Trade-Offs

As shown in this chapter, PyMailCGI is still something of a system in the making, but it does work as advertised: when it is installed on a remote server machine, by pointing a browser at the main page's URL, I can check and send email from anywhere I happen to be, as long as I can find a machine with a web browser. In fact, any machine and browser will do: Python doesn't even have to be installed, and I don't need POP or SMTP access on the client machine itself. That's not the case with the PyMailGUI client-side program we wrote in Chapter 15. This property is especially useful in organizations that allow web access, but restrict more direct protocols such as POP email.

But before we all jump on the collective Internet bandwagon and utterly abandon traditional APIs such as Tkinter, a few words of larger context may be in order. Besides illustrating larger CGI applications in general, this example was chosen to underscore some of the trade-offs you run into when building applications to run on the Web. PyMailGUI and PyMailCGI do roughly the same things but are radically different in implementation:


PyMailGUI

This is a traditional user-interface program: it runs entirely on the local machine, calls out to an in-process GUI API library to implement interfaces, and talks to the Internet through sockets only when it has to (e.g., to load or send email on demand). User requests are routed immediately to callback handler method functions running locally and in-process, with shared variables that automatically retain state between requests. As mentioned, because its memory is retained between events, PyMailGUI can cache messages in memoryit loads email headers and selected mails only once, fetches newly arrived message headers only on future loads, and has enough information to perform general inbox synchronization checks. On deletions, PyMailGUI can simply refresh its memory cache of loaded headers without having to reload from the server. Moreover, because PyMailGUI runs as a single process on the local machine, it can leverage tools such as multithreading to allow mail transfers to overlap in time (you can send while a load is in progress), and it can more easily support extra functionality such as local mail file saves and opens.


PyMailCGI

This, like all CGI systems, consists of scripts that reside and run on a server machine and generate HTML to interact with a user's web browser on the client machine. It runs only in the context of a web browser or other HTML-aware client, and it handles user requests by running CGI scripts on the web server. Without manually managed state retention techniques such as a server-side database system, there is no equivalent to the persistent memory of PyMailGUIeach request handler runs autonomously, with no memory except that which is explicitly passed along by prior states as hidden form fields, URL query parameters, and so on. Because of that, PyMailCGI currently must reload all email headers whenever it needs to display the selection list, naïvely reloads messages already fetched earlier in the session, and cannot perform general inbox synchronization tests. This can be improved by more advanced state-retention schemes, but none is as straightforward as the persistent in-process memory of PyMailGUI.

On a basic level, both systems use the Python POP and SMTP modules to fetch and send email through sockets. But the implementation alternatives they represent have some critical ramifications that you should know about when considering delivering systems on the Web:


Performance costs

Networks are slower than CPUs. As implemented, PyMailCGI isn't nearly as fast or as complete as PyMailGUI. In PyMailCGI, every time the user clicks a Submit button, the request goes across the network. More specifically, every user request incurs a network transfer overhead, every callback handler may take the form of a newly spawned process or thread on some servers, parameters come in as text strings that must be parsed out, and the lack of state information on the server between pages means that either mail needs to be reloaded often, or relatively slow state retention options must be employed.

In contrast, user clicks in PyMailGUI trigger in-process function calls rather than network traffic and program executions, and state is easily saved as Python in-process variables. Even with an ultra-fast Internet connection, a server-side CGI system is slower than a client-side program. To be fair, some Tkinter operations are sent to the underlying Tcl library as strings too, which must be parsed. This may change in time, but the contrast here is with CGI scripts versus GUI libraries in general. Function calls will probably always beat network transfers.

Some of these bottlenecks may be designed away at the cost of extra program complexity. For instance, some web servers use threads and process pools to minimize process creation for CGI scripts. Moreover, as we've seen, some state information can be manually passed along from page to page in hidden form fields, generated URL parameters, and client-side cookies, and state can be saved between pages in a concurrently accessible database to minimize mail reloads. But there's no getting past the fact that routing events and data over a network to scripts is slower than calling a Python function directly.


Complexity costs

HTML isn't pretty. Because PyMailCGI must generate HTML to interact with the user in a web browser, it is also more complex (or at least, less readable) than PyMailGUI. In some sense, CGI scripts embed HTML code in Python. Because the end result of this is a mixture of two very different languages, creating an interface with HTML in a CGI script can be much less straightforward than making calls to a GUI API such as Tkinter.

Witness, for example, all the care we've taken to escape HTML and URLs in this chapter's examples; such constraints are grounded in the nature of HTML. Furthermore, changing the system to retain loaded-mail list state in a database between pages would introduce further complexities to the CGI-based solution. And secure HTTP would eliminate the manual encryption complexity but would introduce new server configuration complexity.


Functionality costs

HTML can say only so much. HTML is a portable way to specify simple pages and forms, but it is poor to useless when it comes to describing more complex user interfaces. Because CGI scripts create user interfaces by writing HTML back to a browser, they are highly limited in terms of user-interface constructs. For example, consider implementing an image processing and animation program as CGI scripts: HTML doesn't easily apply once we leave the domain of fill-out forms and simple interactions.

It is possible to generate graphics in CGI scripts. They may be created and stored in temporary files on the server, with per-session filenames referenced in image tags in the generated HTML reply. For browsers that support the notion, graphic images may also be in-lined in HTML image tags, encoded in base64 format or similar. Either technique is substantially more complex than using an image in the Tkinter GUI library, though. Moreover, responsive animation and drawing applications are beyond the scope of a protocol such as CGI, which requires a network transaction per interaction. The interactive drawing and animation scripts we wrote at the end of Chapter 10, for example, could not be implemented as normal server-side scripts.

This is precisely the limitation that Java applets were designed to addressprograms that are stored on a server but are pulled down to run on a client on demand and are given access to a full-featured GUI API for creating richer user interfaces. Nevertheless, strictly server-side programs are inherently limited by the constraints of HTML.

Beyond HTML's limitations, client-side programs such as PyMailGUI also have access to tools such as multithreading which are difficult to emulate in a CGI-based application (threads spawned by a CGI script cannot outlive the CGI script itself, or augment its reply once sent). Persistent process models for web applications such as FastCGI, discussed in Chapter 16, may provide options here, but the picture is not as clear-cut as on the client.

Although web developers make noble efforts at emulating client-side capabilities, such efforts add additional complexity, can stretch the server-side programming model nearly to its breaking point, and account for much of the plethora of divergent web techniques.


Portability benefits

All you need is a browser on clients. Because PyMailCGI runs over the Web, it can be run on any machine with a web browser, whether that machine has Python and Tkinter installed or not. That is, Python needs to be installed on only one computerthe web server machine where the scripts actually live and run. This is probably the most compelling benefit to the web application model. As long as you know that the users of your system have an Internet browser, installation is simple. You still need Python on the server, but that's easier to guarantee.

Python and Tkinter, you will recall, are very portable toothey run on all major window systems (X, Windows, Mac)but to run a client-side Python/Tkinter program such as PyMailGUI, you need Python and Tkinter on the client machine itself. Not so with an application built as CGI scripts: they will work on Macintosh, Linux, Windows, and any other machine that can somehow render HTML web pages. In this sense, HTML becomes a sort of portable GUI API language in CGI scripts, interpreted by your web browser. You don't even need the source code or bytecode for the CGI scripts themselvesthey run on a remote server that exists somewhere else on the Net, not on the machine running the browser.


Execution requirements

But you do need a browser. That is, the very nature of web-enabled systems can render them useless in some environments. Despite the pervasiveness of the Internet, many applications still run in settings that don't have web browsers or Internet access. Consider, for instance, embedded systems, real-time systems, and secure government applications. While an intranet (a local network without external connections) can sometimes make web applications feasible in some such environments, I have worked at more than one company whose client sites had no web browsers to speak of. On the other hand, such clients may be more open to installing systems like Python on local machines, as opposed to supporting an internal or external network.


Administration requirements

You really need a server too. You can't write CGI-based systems at all without access to a web sever. Further, keeping programs on a centralized server creates some fairly critical administrative overheads. Simply put, in a pure client/server architecture, clients are simpler, but the server becomes a critical path resource and a potential performance bottleneck. If the centralized server goes down, you, your employees, and your customers may be knocked out of commission. Moreover, if enough clients use a shared server at the same time, the speed costs of web-based systems become even more pronounced. In production systems, advanced techniques such as load balancing and fail-over servers help, but they add new requirements.

In fact, one could make the argument that moving toward a web server architecture is akin to stepping backward in timeto the time of centralized mainframes and dumb terminals. Whichever way we step, offloading and distributing processing to client machines at least partially avoids this processing bottleneck.

17.8.1. Other Approaches

So what's the best way to build applications for the Internetas client-side programs that talk to the Net, or as server-side programs that live and breathe on the Net? Naturally, there is no one answer to that question, since it depends upon each application's unique constraints. Moreover, there are more possible answers to it than we have proposed here.

For instance, some systems attempt to separate logic from display so much as to make the choice almost irrelevantby completely encapsulating display details, a single program can, in principle, render its user interface as either a traditional GUI or an HTML-based web page. Due to the vastly different architectures, though, this ideal is difficult to achieve and does not address larger disparities between the client and server platforms. Issues such as state retention and network interfaces are much more significant than generation of windows and controls, and may impact code more.

Other systems may try to achieve similar goals by abstracting the display representationa common XML representation, for instance, might lend itself to both a GUI and an HTML rendering. Again, this addresses only the rendering of the display, not the fundamental architectural differences of client- and server-side approaches.

Although the client and server do imply trade-offs, many of the common CGI drawbacks already have common proposed solutions. For example:


Client-side solutions

Client- and server-side programs can be mixed in many ways. For instance, applet programs live on a server but are downloaded to and run as client-side programs with access to rich GUI libraries (more on applets when we discuss Jython in Chapter 18).

Other technologies, such as embedding JavaScript or Python directly in HTML code, also support client-side execution and richer GUI possibilities. Such scripts live in HTML on the server but run on the client when downloaded and access browser components through an exposed object model to customize pages (this is introduced near the end of Chapter 18).

The Dynamic HTML (DHTML) extensions provide yet another client-side scripting option for changing web pages after they have been constructed. And the newly emerging AJAX model offers additional ways to add interactivity to web pages. All of these client-side technologies add extra complexities all their own, but they ease some of the limitations imposed by straight HTML.


State retention solutions

We discussed general state retention options is detail in the prior chapter, and we will study full-scale database systems for Python in Chapter 19. Some web application servers (e.g., Zope, described in Chapter 18) naturally support state retention between pages by providing concurrently accessible object databases. Some of these systems have a real underlying database component (e.g., Oracle and MySQL); others may use flat files or Python persistent shelves with appropriate locking.

Scripts can also pass state information around in hidden form fields and generated URL parameters, as done in PyMailCGI, or they can store it on the client machine itself using the standard cookie protocol. As we learned in Chapter 16, cookies are strings of information that are stored on the client upon request from the server, and that are transferred back to the server when a page is revisited (data is sent back and forth in HTTP header lines). Cookies are more complex than program variables and are somewhat controversial, but they can offload some simple state retention tasks.

Alternative models such as FastCGI and mod_python offer additional persistence optionswhere supported, FastCGI applications may retain context in long-lived processes, and mod_python provides session data within Apache.


HTML generation solutions

Third-party extensions can also take some of the complexity out of embedding HTML in Python CGI scripts, albeit at some cost to execution speed. For instance, the HTMLgen system described in Chapter 18 lets programs build pages as trees of Python objects that "know" how to produce HTML. Other frameworks prove an object-based interface to reply-stream generation (e.g., a reply object with methods). When a system like this is employed, Python scripts deal only with objects, not with the syntax of HTML itself.

Other systems such as PHP, Python Server Pages, Zope's DTML and ZPT, and Active Server Pages (some of which are described in the next chapter) provide server-side templating languages, which allow scripting language code to be embedded in HTML and executed on the server, to dynamically generate or determine part of the HTML that is sent back to a client in response to requests. The net result more cleanly insulates Python code from the complexity of HTML code and promotes the separation of display format and business logic.

Clearly, Internet technology does come with some compromises, and it is still evolving rapidly. It is nevertheless an appropriate delivery context for many, though not all, applications. As with every design choice, you must be the judge. While delivering systems on the Web may have some costs in terms of performance, functionality, and complexity, it is likely that the significance of those overheads may diminish with time. Some of the tools we'll meet in the next chapter are aimed at this very goal.

Suggested Reading: The PyErrata System

Now that I've told you all the reasons you might not want to design systems for the Web, I'm going to completely contradict myself and refer you to a system that almost requires a web-based implementation. The second edition of this book included a chapter that presented the PyErrata web sitea Python program that lets arbitrary people on arbitrary machines submit book comments and bug reports (usually called errata) over the Web, using just a web browser.


Due to space concerns, that chapter has been cut from this edition's printed form. However, we're making its original content available as optional, supplemental reading. You can find this example's code, as well as the original chapter's file, in the directory PP3E\Internet\Web\PyErrata of the book examples distribution tree (see the Preface for more on the examples distribution).

PyErrata is in some ways simpler than the PyMailCGI case study presented in this chapter. From a user's perspective, PyErrata is more hierarchical than linear: user interactions are shorter and spawn fewer pages. There is also little state retention in the web pages themselves in PyErrataURL parameters pass state in only one isolated case, and no hidden form fields are generated.

On the other hand, PyErrata introduces an entirely new dimension: persistent data storage. State (error and comment reports) is stored permanently by this system on the server, either in flat pickle files or in a shelve-based database. Both raise the specter of concurrent updates, since any number of users out in cyberspace may be accessing the site at the same time, so PyErrata also introduces file-locking techniques along the way.

I no longer maintain the web site described by this extra chapter, and the material itself is slightly out of date in some ways (e.g., the os.open call is preferred for file locking now, and I would probably use a different data storage system today, such as ZODB). But it provides an additional Python web site case study, and it more closely reflects web sites that must store information on the server.




Programming Python
Programming Python
ISBN: 0596009259
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 270
Authors: Mark Lutz

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