Develop Reference

Deploy a Python application to web that interacts with local files

Background: Am comfortable in Python, know nothing about web deployment. I am looking into it as an alternative to compiling into .exe or .app for Win or Mac distributions.
Issue: I have a simple application that uses BeautifulSoup, openpyxl, and PySimplyGUI. It interacts with some local excel-files and creates new ones. I want to be able to, using minimum effort, make it accessible on my own web page or something similar, and make the created excel-files available for browsing/download. I have no idea how to do any of this. I've been looking into Flask and cloud foundry, but it feels like there should be some easy alternative that I'm missing. Ideally I would want a page where someone can log in (given a username and password I supply), which then directs to a page where the user can interact with my application.
Request: Is there a relatively easy way to do this that doesn't involve setting up a lot of stuff in html, etc., and where excel-files can still be interacted with by openpyxl? I ideally would just want some template, where I can "fill in the blanks" for the python method I would want to execute for each button!
Hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance :)

The easiest way to create a web app with a simple interface yet effective which does not require frontend programming is Streamlit. It is primarily used by data scientist to create simple web apps quickly.

Is it possible to run a Python app on a WordPress site?

I have an idea for a web app and plan to learn Python as I go (right now I know html/css, some javascript, some php and sql). The app would be able to manipulate and analyze audio files, among other things.
Ideally, I'd like to make the app available through my wordpress site so that I can take advantage of WordPress's login management and the plugin s2member's subscription management and content restriction capabilities.
Is that possible? Would it even make sense?
If not, is there a better alternative to automate all of that (the subscription management, logins, payment processing, content restriction, etc) without having to code it myself?

I suggest you develop a REST API in Python and extend your Wordpress site to consume that API.
For the Python side, you could go with Flask and use Flask-RESTful.
For the Wordpress side, have a look at this question.

Sure, if you meet a couple of conditions:
The server your wordpress site is on also has python
And you have the ability run arbitrary python scripts on said server.
Here's a (very contrived) example of how to do it from a plugin:
call-python.php (plugin file):
<php
/*
Plugin name: Call Python
Author:..
....
*/
$pyScript = "/path/to/app.py";
exec("/usr/bin/python $pyScript", $output);
var_dump($output);
And the python script app.py:
print("Hello, World")
And that's it! That will dump Hello, world to the body. Obviously you'll need a bit more for a more complicated python app, but it will work.
Like others are saying, there may be better "more correct" ways of doing it. But if your end goal is to run a python app from WordPress it's possible.

How can I programmatically interact with a website that uses an AJAX JBoss RichTree component?

I'm writing a python script to do some screen scraping of a public website. This is going fine, until I want to interact with an AJAX-implemented tree control. Evidently, there is a large amount of javascript controlling the AJAX requests. It seems that the tree control is a JBoss RichFaces RichTree component.
How should I interact with this component programatically?
Are there any tricks I should know about?
Should I try an implement a subset of the RichFaces AJAX?
Or would I be better served wrapping some code around an existing web-browser? If so, is there a python library that can help with this?

PhantomJS Is probably the most interesting project letting you do javascript stuff in a headless environment with a decent API. While it doesn't support python natively anymore, there are options for interacting with it. Check out the discussion here for more info.
There is also vanilla webkit (wrapped by Qt and then PyQT). Check out an example here.
Hope that helps :)

You need to make the AJAX calls from your client to the server and interpret the data. Interpreting the AJAX data is easier and less error-prone than scraping HTML any way.
Although it can be a bit tricky to figure out the AJAX API if it isn't documented. A network sniffer tool like wireshark can be helpful there, there may also be useful plugins for your browser to do the same nowadays. I haven't needed to do that for years. :-)

Is it possible to write dynamic web pages in Python with the Really Simple HTTP Server?

I know that with the SimpleHTTPServer I can make my directories accessible by web-browsers via Internet. So, I run just one line of the code and, as a result, another person working on another computer can use his/her browser to see content of my directories.
But I wander if I can make more complicated things. For example, somebody uses his/her browser to load my Python program with a set of parameter (example.py?x=2&y=2) and, as a result, he/she sees the HTML page generated by the Python program (not the Python program).
I also wander if I can process html form submitted to the SimpleHTTPServer.

While it is possible, you have to do pretty much everything yourself (parsing request parameters, handle routing, etc).
If you are not looking to get experience in creating web-frameworks, but just want to create a small site you should probably use a minimalistic framework instead.
Try Bottle, a simple single-file web framework: http://bottlepy.org

Maybe the VerseMatch project and related recipes over at ActiveState is something you would be interested in examining? It implements a small application using the standard library for dynamic running.

have you considered using CGIHTTPServer instead of SimpleHTTPServer? Then you can toss your scripts in cgi-bin and they'll execute. You have to include content-type header and whatnot but if you're looking for quick and dirty it's real convenient

Python web server?

I want to develop a tool for my project using python. The requirements are:
Embed a web server to let the user get some static files, but the traffic is not very high.
User can configure the tool using http, I don't want a GUI page, I just need a RPC interface, like XML-RPC? or others?
Besides the web server, the tool need some background job to do, so these jobs need to be done with the web server.
So, Which python web server is best choice? I am looking at CherryPy, If you have other recommendation, please write it here.

what about the internal python webserver ?
just type "python web server" in google, and host the 1st result...

Well, I used web frameworks like TurboGears, my current projects are based on Pylons. The last ist fairly easy to learn and both come with CherryPy.
To do some background job you could implement that in pylons too.
Just go to your config/environment.py and see that example:
(I implemented a queue here)
from faxserver.lib.myQueue import start_queue
...
def load_environment(global_conf, app_conf):
...
start_queue()
It depends on your need if you simply use CherryPy or start to use something more complete like Pylons.

Use the WSGI Reference Implementation wsgiref already provided with Python
Use REST protocols with JSON (not XML-RPC). It's simpler and faster than XML.
Background jobs are started with subprocess.

Why dont you use open source build tools (continuous integration tools) like Cruise. Most of them come with a web server/xml interface and sometimes with fancy reports as well.

This sounds like a fun project. So, why don't write your own HTTP server? Its not so complicated after all, HTTP is a well-known and easy to implement protocol and you'll gain a lot of new knowledge!
Check documentation or manual pages (whatever you prefer) of socket(), bind(), listen(), accept() and so on.