Dabbling in Python 3.0

Well, Python 3.0 was released a few days ago. I admit, I really haven't been keeping up much with Python development. Up until yesterday, Python 2.5 was all that I've used.

Anyway, I was curious. I was curious about all the backwards-incompatible changes to the language/libraries. I was curious about how WSGI dealt with Python 3.0. With the list of proposed WSGI 1.0 amendments for Python 3.0 (and the Web-SIG posts it referenced), I attempted to port both flup and ajp-wsgi.

It was interesting, at least, to see the issues in two different lights. Though flup and ajp-wsgi do the same thing conceptually, flup is pure-Python and ajp-wsgi is pure-C. The most pain for both, unsurprisingly, came from the new str/bytes distinction. While it was an annoying issue to deal with (and I realize as far as the spec is concerned, all details about it still haven't been worked out), I do welcome the change.

I've published both repositories, for the curious. They work for simple "Hello World" type applications. I kind of doubt that any frameworks have been ported to Python 3.0 yet. I probably won't touch them again until the spec has been clarified more. (Encoding of environ key/values? file_wrapper support with e.g. text-mode files?)

Interestingly, I didn't actually test the FastCGI and SCGI adapters with "real" web servers. (I don't have anything set up.) I used the flup client implementations to cross-test clients/servers on 2.x/3.0. So those flup WSGI servers might actually be broken.

The repositories:

• http://hg.saddi.com/ajp-wsgi-py3.0/
• http://hg.saddi.com/flup-py3.0/