It's almost scary how the same idea can come up in different language
communities at the same time -- here's a post from to Python Web-SIG
list from a couple of weeks ago defining a draft version of of a very
simple generic web app server API:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2004-August/000518.html

The author goes for an extremely minimal approach; all the proposal
includes is a standard top-level entry point method interface for web
apps, which accepts an environment hash and a callback method which
will generate an output stream when called with a status code and
headers.

IMHO, it's too little to be very useful; without standardizing
query/form parameter passing, at least, you're still going to have to
muck about in the underlying app server API for anything more complex
than "Hello, world!" Interesting reading though.

-- 
Lennon
rcoder.net