Can you display python web code in Joomla?

Question

I'm building a Joomla 3 web site but I have the need to customize quite a few pages. I know I can use PHP with Joomla, but is it also possible to use Python with it? Specifically, I'm looking to use CherryPy to write some custom pieces of code but I want them to be displayed in native Joomla pages (not just iFrames). Is this possible?

Answer 1

PHP execution of Python "scripts"

This will work for scripts, which do stuff and return the output, not for CherryPy.

 <?php
    // execute your Python script from PHP
    $command = escapeshellcmd('myPythonScript.py');
    $output = shell_exec($command);

    echo $output;

    // take response content to embed it into the page
 ?>

PHP to access a Python/CherryPy served website

import cherrypy
class HelloWorld(object):
    def index(self):
        return "Hello World!"
    index.exposed = True

cherrypy.quickstart(HelloWorld())

This starts a http://localhost:8080 and you should see Hello world!.

Now you could access CherryPy's output by accessing it at it's localhost:port. Not good performance-wise, but works.

<?php
    $output = file_get_contents('http://localhost:8080/');
    echo $output;
?>

Joomla + Ajax to access a Pyhton/CherryPy served website

An alternative solution would be, to not use PHP to fetch the content, but to do the fetch from client-side. Basically, you would use an Ajax-Request to the CherryPy served website, to fetch it's content and embed it into the dom of the Joomla served page.

 // add jQuery Ajax reqeust from your Joomla page to CherryPy
 $.ajax({
    url: "https://localhost:8080/", // <-- access the 2nd served website
    type: 'GET',
    success: function(res) {
      //console.log(res);
      alert(res);
      $("#someElement").html(res);
    }
 });