The Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.
In computing, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program to process HTTP or HTTPS user requests.
The Web Server Gateway Interface is a simple calling convention for web servers to forward requests to web applications or frameworks written in the Python programming language. The current version of WSGI, version 1.0.1, is specified in Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 3333.
Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) is a communications protocol providing security to datagram-based applications by allowing them to communicate in a way designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery. The DTLS protocol is based on the stream-oriented Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and is intended to provide similar security guarantees. The DTLS protocol datagram preserves the semantics of the underlying transport—the application does not suffer from the delays associated with stream protocols, but because it uses UDP or SCTP, the application has to deal with packet reordering, loss of datagram and data larger than the size of a datagram network packet. Because DTLS uses UDP or SCTP rather than TCP, it avoids the "TCP meltdown problem", when being used to create a VPN tunnel.
CherryPy is an object-oriented web application framework using the Python programming language. It is designed for rapid development of web applications by wrapping the HTTP protocol but stays at a low level and does not offer much more than what is defined in RFC 7231.
Django is a free and open-source, Python-based web framework that runs on a web server. It follows the model–template–views (MTV) architectural pattern. It is maintained by the Django Software Foundation (DSF), an independent organization established in the US as a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
The Simple Common Gateway Interface (SCGI) is a protocol for applications to interface with HTTP servers, as an alternative to the CGI protocol. It is similar to FastCGI but is designed to be easier to parse. Unlike CGI, it permits a long-running service process to continue serving requests, thus avoiding delays in responding to requests due to setup overhead.
LAMP is an acronym denoting one of the most common software stacks for the web's most popular applications. Its generic software stack model has largely interchangeable components.
TurboGears is a Python web application framework consisting of several WSGI components such as WebOb, SQLAlchemy, Kajiki template language and Repoze.
The Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) is a binary protocol that can proxy inbound requests from a web server through to an application server that sits behind the web server. AJP is a highly trusted protocol and should never be exposed to untrusted clients, which could use it to gain access to sensitive information or execute code on the application server.
Nginx is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Russian developer Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. Nginx is free and open-source software, released under the terms of the 2-clause BSD license. A large fraction of web servers use Nginx, often as a load balancer.
mod_wsgi is an Apache HTTP Server module by Graham Dumpleton that provides a WSGI compliant interface for hosting Python based web applications under Apache. As of version 4.5.3, mod_wsgi supports Python 2 and 3.
Web2py is an open-source web application framework written in the Python programming language. Web2py allows web developers to program dynamic web content using Python. Web2py is designed to help reduce tedious web development tasks, such as developing web forms from scratch, although a web developer may build a form from scratch if required.
Phusion Passenger is a free web server and application server with support for Ruby, Python and Node.js. It is designed to integrate into the Apache HTTP Server or the nginx web server, but also has a mode for running standalone without an external web server. Phusion Passenger supports Unix-like operating systems, and is available as a gem package, as a tarball, or as native Linux packages.
Slowloris is a type of denial of service attack tool which allows a single machine to take down another machine's web server with minimal bandwidth and side effects on unrelated services and ports.
Cherokee is an open-source cross-platform web server that runs on Linux, BSD variants, Solaris, OS X, and Windows. It is a lightweight, high-performance web server/reverse proxy licensed under the GNU General Public License. Its goal is to be fast and fully functional yet still light. Major features of Cherokee include a graphical administration interface named cherokee-admin, and a modular light-weight design.
Flask is a micro web framework written in Python. It is classified as a microframework because it does not require particular tools or libraries. It has no database abstraction layer, form validation, or any other components where pre-existing third-party libraries provide common functions. However, Flask supports extensions that can add application features as if they were implemented in Flask itself. Extensions exist for object-relational mappers, form validation, upload handling, various open authentication technologies and several common framework related tools.
FastCGI is a binary protocol for interfacing interactive programs with a web server. It is a variation on the earlier Common Gateway Interface (CGI). FastCGI's main aim is to reduce the overhead related to interfacing between web server and CGI programs, allowing a server to handle more web page requests per unit of time.
The Gunicorn "Green Unicorn" is a Python Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) HTTP server. It is a pre-fork worker model, ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with a number of web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources and fairly fast. It is often paired with Nginx, as the two have complementary features.
The Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface (ASGI) is a calling convention for web servers to forward requests to asynchronous-capable Python programming language frameworks, and applications. It is built as a successor to the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI).
