How do I create a web interface to a simple python script?

You might consider Tornado if Django is too much overhead. I've used both and agree that, if you have something simple/small to do and don't already know Django, it's going to exponentially increase your time to production. On the other hand, you can 'get' Tornado in a couple of hours and get something relatively simple done in a day or two with no prior experience with it. At least, that's been my experience with it.

Note that Tornado is still a tradeoff: you get a lot of simplicity in exchange for the huge cornucopia of features and shortcuts you get w/ Django.

PS - in addition to being a 'micro-framework', Tornado is also its own web server, so there's no mucking with wsgi/mod-cgi/fcgi.... just write your request handlers and run it. Be sure to see the demos included in the distribution.

Have you considered Flask? Like Tornado, it is both a "micro-framework" and a simple web server, so it has everything you need right out of the box. http://flask.pocoo.org/

This example (right off the homepage) pretty much sums up how simple the code can be:

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def hello():
    return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

If you are creating non-interactive pages, you can easily setup any modern web server to execute your python script as a CGI. Instead of loading a static file, your web server will return the output of your python script.

This isn't very sophisticated, but if you are simply returning the output without needing browser submitted date, this is the easiest way (scaling under load is a different story).

You don't even need the "cgi" module from python, if you aren't receiving any data from the browser. Anything more complicated than this and you should use a web framework.

Examples and other methods

• Simple Example: hardest part is webserver configuration
• mod_python: Cut down on CGI overhead (otherwise, apache execs the python interpreter for each hit)
• python module cgi: sending data to your python script from the browser.

Sorting

Javascript side sorting: I've used this javascript library to add sortable tables. This is the easiest way to add sorting without requiring additional work or another HTTP GET.

Instructions:
Download this file
Add to your HTML
Add class="sortable" to any table you'd like to make sortable
Click on the headers to sort

Have you seen bottle framework? It is a micro framework and very simple.