whisky-time

9th December 2013 - A Gentle Introduction to Web Apps...

Challenge

Create a web application to calculate the cooking time for a Christmas turkey.

Specs

• Your application should take the weight in kg from the path given to the web application, and return the cooking time in plain text. e.g. visiting http://localhost:8000/5.25 in your browser should return:

  X hours YY minutes
  

• Use the following to calculate cooking time - these are base on NHS guidelines for turkey cooking time but having fixed the "gotchas" contained therein (if you finish early, see how many you can find there!):

  • allow 45 minutes per kg plus 20 minutes for a turkey under 4.5kg
  • allow 40 minutes per kg plus 20 minutes for a turkey of 4.5kg or more but less than 6.5kg
  • allow 35 minutes per kg plus 20 minutes for a turkey of 6.5kg or more

• Your application should comply with PEP 333 - WSGI, pronounced "whisky"

• Use ONLY The Python standard library - DO NOT use a Python web-framework to achieve the task

  (doing the task without a framework will give you a better understanding of how some of the frameworks operate if you need to use them in future)

Hints

• The built-in wsgiref module is your friend!

Solution

You're surely not expecting me to give you that just yet! I'll try to make available by about 19:30.

Extra credit

• Have the application return the result in HTML or JSON

• Fix the default calculation so that the application doesn't return odd result (shorter cooking times for a larger turkeys) around the thresholds (4.5kg, 6.5kg).

• Write a web app that performs a task from a previous PyPool:

  • Love calculator
  • Roman numeral conversion - Roman to Arabic or Arabic to Roman

• Run your WSGI app under another framwework's web server (e.g. CherryPy, Tornado) - these are probably more suitable for production use than the server provided by wsgiref!