Have Users Change a Running Python Script's Variables over the Web?

• I'm writing a simple simulator with python and I would like to be able to have my users log in to the simulator over the internet and change their own set of variables. I know next-to-nothing on web programming and I'm not to concerned about security, the simulation will be on it's own dedicated machine.

• Answer:

  You need to be a lot more specific. I would like to be able to have my users: log on to the simulator over the internet. What do you mean by "log on?" Are they going to be given a username and a password? Is each user going to have their own username and password? change their own set of variables Does this mean that each user is going to have their own instance of the simulation, so that changing their variables only applies to their instance of the simulation? Or is there one instance of the simulation and each user changes a subset of the inputs? Or something else? I know next-to-nothing on web programming and I'm not to concerned about security, the simulation will be on it's own dedicated machine. If you hook your simulation to the web, you are doing web programming. If you are doing web programming, you should be concerned about security. Running the simulation on it's own dedicated machine may be part of a security strategy, but it probably isn't sufficient. You'll probably, at the very least, want to sanitize user input to prevent code injection. You'll also want the simulation running as a user with minimal privileges to make other changes to the machine, and you'll probably want the machine firewalled-off from other systems. Since you are doing web programming, you'll may also need a concurrency strategy for the eventually that two or more users submit inputs at the same time. It is something that they could tweak the parameters while it is running. Is the simulation running continuously, or does it just run in response to user inputs? Is the state of the simulation preserved between inputs, or does it start from the same initial state each time a user tweaks a parameter? I don't need live web updates or anything like that. The results would stay on the machine running the simulation. All I would need is for my users to be able to change the parameters. This doesn't sound like "tweaking" to me. To me, tweaking implies that the user gets to see the results of their changes. Or do you just mean that the user doesn't need changes from the ongoing execution of the simulation pushed to their browser automatically? At a minimum, you'll need an HTTP server. That HTTP server will need to serve a static web page with a form with fields for the inputs users are allowed to make. That form will have to submit those inputs back to the web server. There will need to be a CGI script or some other request handler that parses the request parameters passed along by the web server and executes your simulation with the provided parameters and then provides some sort of HTML response back to the web server to return to the client. I think the python standard library has a CGI module to help with this sort of thing. The CGI approach will be fine for situations when the simulation executes for a relatively short period of time after receiving new inputs. It will work less well if the simulation is running continuously. In that case, you will need a long-running process for your simulation, and then a way to communicate between your simulation and an HTTP server. One way of doing that is to build a request handler directly into you your simulation, or, build your simulation directly into a request handler. You'd probably want to start with a minimal python web framework. Django sounds like overkill...maybe something like Flask, or Bottle. Follow their recommended practices for deployment. How does your simulation run now? How do people interact with it if it is running locally?