How do I properly serve json data with Python?

Question

I've searched high and low for an answer and can't figure out what i'm doing wrong. I'm creating an api that returns json data. I would prefer the response to be printed to the browser as well, if possible. What am I doing wrong?

#!/usr/bin/python

import simplejson as json

class serve_json:
    def __init__(self):
        x = {"msg": "Some message", "error": "Some error"}

        html_to_display = 'Content-Type: application/json\n\n'
        html_to_display += json.dumps(x)
        print html_to_display

serve_json()

The above code doesn't work, and it doesn't print the result to the browser. If I change the Content-Type to "text/html", it prints to the screen fine, but still doesn't work as json data.

• I'm not using any framework, everything i'm doing is straight python/javascript.
• This script is executed by an http POST request.

• This script is executed via /cgi

• http://grouped.com/cgi-bin/upload_example.php (Works perfectly)

• http://grouped.com/cgi-bin/upload_example.py (Does not work - Content-Type = text/html)
• The code listed above also does not work either and represents an identical example as the one above except the Content-Type is set to application/json

Answer 1

I'd recommend bottle, it's really easy to build simple little JSON services with it:

from bottle import *

@get('/')
def serve_json():
    return {"msg": "Some message", "error": "Some error"}

run(host='localhost', port=8080)

One neat feature of bottle is that it'll automatically serve JSON from a route that returns a dict. You can execute python serve_json.py to run your app using the built-in HTTP server, host it as a WSGI application, etc.