The standard Python libraries provide a pure-Python HTTP server in the BaseHTTPServer module. Code contributed by Matt Goodall allows you to deploy your Albatross applications as stand-alone scripts using this module to service HTTP requests.
Unlike the other Request classes, applications deployed via the stand-alone Python HTTP server do not require you to instantiate the Request class directly. Instead, the al-httpd script imports your application (specifically, the script that instantiates the application object), and starts the HTTP server.
Currently, applications deployed via the stand-alone http server are single threaded, meaning that other requests are blocked while the current request is being serviced. In many cases this is not a problem as the requests are handled quickly, but if your application takes a significant amount of time to generate it's results, you may want to consider other deployment options for production use.
The stand-alone http server makes it particularly easy to deploy Albatross applications, and is a great way to debug applications without the complications that mod_python and FastCGI necessarily entail.
Most of the Albatross samples can be run under the stand-alone server:
$ cd samples/tree2 $ al-httpd tree.app 8080 /alsamp/images ../images/