Other Possibilities

There’s a whole host of other types of content you can generate in Python. Here are a few more ideas and some pointers to libraries you could use to implement them:

• ZIP files: Python’s standard library ships with the zipfile module, which can both read and write compressed ZIP files. You could use it to provide on-demand archives of a bunch of files, or perhaps compress large documents when requested. You could similarly produce TAR files using the standard library tarfile
• Dynamic images: The Python Imaging Library (PIL) is a fantastic toolkit for producing images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, and a whole lot more). You could use it to automatically scale down images into thumbnails, composite multiple images into a single frame, or even do Web-based image processing.
• Plots and charts: There are a number of incredibly powerful Python plotting and charting libraries you could use to produce on-demand maps, charts, plots, and graphs. We can’t possibly list them all, so here are a couple of the highlights:
  • matplotlib  can be used to produce the type of high-quality plots usually generated with MatLab or Mathematica.
  • pygraphviz, an interface to the Graphviz graph layout toolkit , can be used for generating structured diagrams of graphs and networks.

In general, any Python library capable of writing to a file can be hooked into Django. The possibilities really are endless. Now that we’ve looked at the basics of generating non-HTML content, let’s step up a level of abstraction. Django ships with some pretty nifty built-in tools for generating some common types of non-HTML content.

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