Python is a general-purpose, high-level, easy-to-use, popular programming language. It is an interpreted language that emphasizes source code readability using strict indentation to determine code blocks. Python is very commonly used as a scripting language, but it is also very popular in the web application development and scientific computing world. There are various powerful web application frameworks, such as Django, Flask, Bottle, and Tornado, available to help developers build awesome web applications using the Python programming language.

OpenShift provides Python web developers with a hosting platform to deploy their web applications. At the time of writing this book, it supports three versions of Python—2.6, 2.7, and 3.3. You can view all the available Python versions by running the following command:

$ rhc cartridges |grep python
python-2.6          Python 2.6                              web
python-2.7          Python 2.7                              web
python-3.3...