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Hey there - we don't officially support Pylons yet so I think any of our clients have run it - and I'm pretty sure apache will complain and give you 500 errors independent of how you set things up.  But - I could be wrong - and for your sake I hope I am.  How are you planning to integrate Rails and Pylons?  Have other people setup Pylons in a shared environment without the easy_install command being run?  

Thanks for the quick reply William. As usual you guys have awesome support. CWM and Euler are two very good Semantic Web libraries/applications written in Python. What I'm doing is exposing CWM's APIs as Web Services, possibly also Euler in order to add a RETE based reasoner. I could use ActiveRDF, and it is both good and in Ruby, but they are no where near CWM's level of features or quality. Eventually I'd like to port CWM to Ruby, but that plays second fiddle to getting everything working and deployed.

The Rails app will then invoke these services when it needs to do reasoning or when it needs to interact with the RDF store.  Pylons seems to be a mix of the Rails philosophy with the Python language, so it seems a good framework to use for the services. As a backup I could just write them without a framework and just use FCGI, but I'd rather not have to reinvent the wheel. The other option I'm considering is abandoning the idea of Pylons as elegant but not practical for now, and implementing the services on top of Django. Would mean a little more each month, and seems a little overkill for just Web Services, but is looking more and more like the way I may have to go.