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Service management using RESTful requests

I am currently working on a project where we need to establish communication like an ESB, between a REST API and the apps services on a small scale.
Scenario:
Assume a web app front end (e.g. Django/Python or Ruby/Rails) and services that are accessible via a HTTP RESTful request.
How can I:
make it configurable which web services are called on a web request depending on the request and not requiring code changes (through keys for example)
encapsulate or implement the services in a way to make it easy to manage them e.g. start/stop etc.
I have been looking at spring.io, but cant work out whether this could be used for the this??
I am open to all suggestions,
Thanks

From what I understand, you want an authorisation solution.
In Rails, Pundit and CanCanCan are very popular. You could also implement it from scratch. Here is a screencast to help you get started.

Delivering Python Processed data to the web

I have developed a python program that parses a webpage and creates a new text document with the parsed data. I want to deliver this new information to the web. I have no idea where to start with something like this. Are there any free options where I can have a site automatically call this python code upon request and update the new data to its page? Or is the only feasible solution here to have my own website/server that uses my code? I'm honestly pretty overwhelmed with many of the options when I try to begin doing a web-search for a solution like this. I have done a decent amount of application programming before so i'm confident in my ability to learn new things, but web protocols are all new to me so its hard to find a starting point.
Ultimately I want this python code to run automatically, or per request of a user, and deliver to the data to them. It could even be through an email, although that is probably less practical.

I personally have good experience using Google Appengine (and its free for a limited amount of requests). The downside is that it does not allow C-extensions or Python3.
If you want to host your own server, tornado is a good option I think. Tornado supports both Python2 and Python3.

There are a great deal of options available.. from 'traditional' virtual server or website hosts like a2hosting or godaddy to 'Cloud Application Hosts' such as Amazon EC2, Heroku or OpenShift.
For your case, and without knowing more, I would suggest that an application hosting is more appropriate, and that you should take a look at Heroku and Openshift in particular.
Define carefully what you want to achieve (how the users access your application, what they see, how they interact with it... etc..) and then evaluate these options based on those requirements.
Most offer a free trial, or even free services, depending on what you need! Good luck

If you've never worked with web technologies before this will be a overwhelming task, since there's a lot of different technologies involved, and many possible ways to combine them.
You'll probably want to start by familiarizing yourself with the very basics of the HTTP protocol.
Then you should read a bit on CGI server-side programming (the article also has a quick overview on HTTP).
Python can run both on CGI and WSGI (if the server provider allows such access), so you may also want to read about WSGI.
Once you grasp all these concepts, you should check this question for actual python techniques.
Also, since you seem to be under the impression you must pay to have a website/app deployed, you should know there are companies that host python apps for free

python web service for a network appliance

As there are so many options to write web service in python, I am a bit confused. I have developed a network appliance, its about Private VLANs.
I want to add to it authenticated web service over HTTPS.
It won't be accessed by regular users. It will be accessed just by other systems looking for some network information. Maybe at a later point I'll build an ajax web client which will use it.
There are endless python options. I am not a web programmer, nor I have the time to be one.
All I need is something each is easy to learn and to implement with the following requirements:
Easy to learn. I just need to expose some sqlite tables/views/queries through authenticated web services.
HTTPS support
basic authentication, where I implement the authentication script.
Any suggestions?
The OS is OpenBSD.
Thanks,
Dan

Python framework for an extremely lightweight python webservice

I want to develop an extremely lightweight web service with a RESTful JSON API. I will do all the session management on the server side. The solution will receive several 100k (or more) API calls an hour and return (compressed) JSON as response, it should be able to scale effortlessly.
Security is naturally important, but I want to avoid heavy weight frameworks like Django etc, and preferably will use a webserver like nginx or lighttpd instead of Apache.
At the server end, this is all I need:
user session management
security (protection against atleast the more common attacks such as cross site request forgery etc)
url routing
http utilities (e.g. compression)
I am aware of web2py, but its deployment options seems 'not well though out' at best - so far, I have been unable to get it to work with Apache, despite following the user manuals.
Can anyone suggest a python framework (and web server) best suited for this task?

if you want to go really lightweight, you might try wsgi itself without a framework, or maybe Flask. I understand wsgi runs on lighttpd, you'll get some hits on a Google search.

Try Pyramid. It's fast, lightweight and with a lot of options to configure your enviroment as you like...

Deciding to WSGI or Django for new web app

I'm in the process of setting up a new web app and deciding whether to just do it with WSGI or go the full framework route with Django.
The app's foremost requirements:
1) The app has no UI what so ever and all of the data is exposed to clients via a REST api with JSON.
2) It will have data to persist so MongoDB & probably Amazon's SimpleDB will be used for the database side.
Is there a reason to use Django or can I get marginal speed improvement with WSGI only?
Previous server-side apps I've built were either with Java/Struts and Groovy/Grails on the JVM. My understanding is that Django is an MVC framework similar to Rails and Grails.
I've also played around with Google App Engine which uses WSGI as thin layer above your code for managing and routing requests.

I suggest you consider something between those two extremes. Flask is lightweight, very easy to use, and connects to your web server via wsgi. You can use regular python database connectors with it, and a few databases even have Flask-specific extension modules.

I have worked with Django for a couple of projects and I like it a lot, but since you are going to use mongoDB and a lot of JSON I suggest you use NodeJS as server side, with Express as framework, you can see a brief tutorial here:
http://howtonode.org/express-mongodb
One of the advantages of this is that you will use only javascript all along your project, I began working with this technology the last month in a Hackathon, and I can tell you that I'm very impressed of how fast and simple it is.

I've worked a bit with some django "apps" ,its really easy, but setting up the "apps" can be a bit of a long process. Django has a lot of nice features that you won't be using and I agree that you might be on one "extreme" here.