Introduction to PSE 4.0

Since even before the release of PSE 3.0, I've been slowly working on freeing PSE from the shackles of mod_python :). For me, that meant implementing PSE as a WSGI application, which is documented in PEP 333.

The concept of PSE was begun in 2001, became a reality early in 2003, and has continued to mature to where it is today. Unfortunately, the only real choice for performance at that time meant mod_python. Now, mod_python is a great product for what it is, but it limits the application of PSE to only installations supporting apache, and then only those who can modify its configuration (e.g. non-shared hosters).

The new version of PSE, which I've labeled 4.0.0alpha1, has been massively reworked to use WSGI as its primary application implementation. That means, any web service that properly implements WSGI according to PEP 303 can now install PSE as an application! Also, because of the new application infrastructure, there are now native implementations of PSE for WSGI, mod_python, cgi, and the command line (i.e. pserun). This infrastructure should make it possible to implement other schemes fairly easily, such as fastcgi.

You can download and play with this at http://nick.borko.org/pse/PSE-4.0.0alpha01.tar.gz or http://nick.borko.org/pse/PSE-4.0.0alpha01.zip (source only, no windows .exe). I consider this "alpha" quality, which means I think it functions substantially in the same way 3.0 does, but not everything has been tested. I'd love to here where it's not working for you.

Thanks for using PSE, and I hope this opens it up for a lot more users!

Nick