In Chapter 2, HTTP and Working with the Web, we explored the HTTP protocol—the primary protocol used by the World Wide Web—and we learned how to use Python as an HTTP client. In Chapter 3, APIs in Action, we expanded on this and looked at ways to consume web APIs. In this chapter, we'll be turning our focus around and looking at how we can use Python to build applications that serve responses to HTTP requests.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following:

I should note up front that hosting modern web applications is a very large topic, and a complete treatment is well beyond the scope of this book, where we're focusing on applying Python code to network problems. Topics such as database access, selecting and configuring load balancers and reverse-proxies, containerization, and the system administration techniques needed to keep the whole show up and running won't be covered here. There are...