WSGI on .NET and in the Cloud

By Michael Foord -
Jeff Hardy has been working on getting Django to run on IronPython, or at least that is part of what he has been working on. This includes his project NWSGI:

NWSGI is a .NET implementation of the Python WSGI specification using IronPython. It is implemented as an ASP.NET HttpHandler. The main goal is to provide an easy path for running Python web applications/frameworks (such as Django, Trac, etc.) on IIS7.

He recently released a new version of NWSGI:
This release has some possibly breaking changes and a whole host of new features. There is also an installer available along with the zip archive.

New features in this release:
  • The major new feature is IIS7 management integration, including a UI editor. It makes configuring NWSGI a breeze from the command line (appcmd) or from the UI. The IIS7 integration is only available through the installer.
  • There is one minor feature addition: wsgi.file_wrapper is now supported for faster file transfers. It uses HttpResponse.TransmitFile to send the file directly.

The changes are in the configuration system to support the IIS7 management system. Unfortunately, IIS7 doesn't use System.Configuration; instead, it has its own assembly, Microsoft.Web.Administration. This caused some complications for configuration. There are now three possible usage scenarios (IIS6, IIS7 xcopy, and IIS7 installed) that require slightly different web.config settings; I will detail these in an upcoming post.

As for using Django with IronPython and NWSGI, Jeff has some interesting ideas (and demo code to go with it) on ASP.NET features that might actually be useful for Django:
Using NWSGI to run Django on IronPython opens up some interesting possibilities, such as using ASP.NET's caching, session, or authentication systems for Django. I imagine any ASP.NET shop spent time configuring their ASP.NET providers for those systems, and I thought it would be interesting to see if that effort could be used for Django apps as well, and it certainly looks like they can.

A demo version of django-aspnet is now available...

Azure is Microsoft's new cloud computing platform. If you're interested in using IronPython and NWSGI on Azure, Jeff has been looking at that too:

Architecturally (as far as NWSGI is concerned), Azure is just IIS7 running in medium trust. You have to use xcopy deployment, which makes me glad I went to the effort of supporting it.

NWSGI 0.6 actually supports medium trust. I only discovered after the release that the error I was hitting was a bug in Cassini; it works fine in medium trust on IIS7. With that hurdle out of the way, there's no reason NWSGI shouldn't work on Azure.

And, what do you know, it works just fine: NWSGI "Hello, World" for Windows Azure. You'll need the Azure SDK and the Visual Studio tools to run it.

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