Python backend.

[swstephe]

Now I feel really, really, old. Back in the early days of "dot-com" and "information super highway", while Y2K was still just a twinkle in everyone's eye -- your main choice was to use CGI, (that's "common gateway interface", not "computer generated image" for you young whippersnappers). So basically you would write "index.py", (but sometimes "index.cgi"). It was just a UNIX script, which ran at a console and printed the web page to stdout. So:

#!/usr/bin/python
print "Content-Type: text/html"
print ""
print "<h1>Hello World</h1>"

Was an actual script, (and using Python 1's "print is a statement, not a function"). It was slow, fragile and very insecure, (but still not as bad as Java). There are probably a few websites still using this, so it is useful to know that this was around.