supported by Python’s xmlrpc standard library package. Such protocols can sim-
plify the interface to web servers in their clients.In deference to time and space, though, we won’t go into further details on these and
other client-side tools here. If you are interested in using Python to script clients, you
should take a few minutes to become familiar with the list of Internet tools documented
in the Python library reference manual. All work on similar principles but have slightly
distinct interfaces.
In Chapter 15, we’ll hop the fence to the other side of the Internet world and explore
scripts that run on server machines. Such programs give rise to the grander notion of
applications that live entirely on the Web and are launched by web browsers. As we
take this leap in structure, keep in mind that the tools we met in this and the preceding
chapter are often sufficient to implement all the distributed processing that many ap-
plications require, and they can work in harmony with scripts that run on a server. To
completely understand the Web worldview, though, we need to explore the server
realm, too.
Before we get there, though, the next chapter puts concepts we’ve learned here to work
by presenting a complete client-side program—a full-blown mail client GUI, which ties
together many of the tools we’ve learned and coded. In fact, much of the email work
we’ve done in this chapter was designed to lay the groundwork we’ll need to tackle the
realistically scaled PyMailGUI example of the next chapter. Really, much of this book
so far has served to build up skills required to equip us for this task: as we’ll see,
PyMailGUI combines system tools, GUIs, and client-side Internet protocols to produce
a useful system that does real work. As an added bonus, this example will help us
understand the trade-offs between the client solutions we’ve met here and the server-
side solutions we’ll study later in this part of the book.
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