Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

If you’re a Python developer who wants to discover how to take the power of functional programming (FP) and bring it into your own programs, then this book is essential for you, even if you know next to nothing about the paradigm. Starting with a general overview of functional concepts, you’ll explore common functional features such as first-class and higher-order functions, pure functions, and more. You’ll see how these are accomplished in Python 3.6 to give you the core foundations you’ll build upon. After that, you’ll discover common functional optimizations for Python to help your apps reach even higher speeds. You’ll learn FP concepts such as lazy evaluation using Python’s generator functions and expressions. Moving forward, you’ll learn to design and implement decorators to create composite functions. You'll also explore data preparation techniques and data exploration in depth, and see how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. Finally, to top off your journey into the world of functional Python, you’ll at look at the PyMonad project and some larger examples to put everything into perspective.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The WSGI standard


The Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) defines a relatively simple, standardized design pattern for creating a response to a web request. This is a common framework for most Python-based web servers. A great deal of information is present at the following link: http://wsgi.readthedocs.org/en/latest/.

Some important background of WSGI can be found at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333.

The Python library's wsgiref package includes a reference implementation of WSGI. Each WSGI application has the same interface, as shown here:

def some_app(environ, start_response):
    return content  

The environ parameter is a dictionary that contains all of the arguments of the request in a single, uniform structure. The headers, the request method, the path, and any attachments for forms or file uploads will all be in the environment. In addition to this, the OS-level context is also provided along with a few items that are part of WSGI request handling.

The start_response parameter...