Can you display python web code in Joomla?

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?

Solution

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);
    }
 });