Twisted Web is a web application server written in pure Python, with APIs at multiple levels of abstraction to facilitate different kinds of web programming. The most useful for web application designers is Web Widgets, a high-level class-and-template oriented system. There is also the Resource system, which Web Widgets is built on.
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Resources are the lowest-level abstraction for applications
in the Twisted web server. Each Resource is a 1:1 mapping with
a path that is requested: you can think of a Resource as a
single "page" to be rendered. The interface for making
Resources is very simple; they must have a method named
render
which takes a single argument, which is the
Request object (an instance of twisted.web.server.Request
). This render
method must return a string, which will be returned to the web
browser making the request. Alternatively, they can return a
special constant, twisted.web.server.NOT_DONE_YET
, which tells
the web server not to close the connection; you must then use
request.write(data)
to render the
page, and call request.finish()
whenever you're done.
Web Widgets are an added layer of abstraction of Resources -- they're much nicer for most sorts of web applications. For more information on Widgets, see Introducing Web Widgets.