Need advice on choosing the technology for intranet based application

[Jeff Davis]

The advice I was about to give you followed what Steve had to say, so I 
have included my comments here.

> Whenever I read "CGI" I also read "a pain to maintain" some words
> later... ? It's a project with a (modest) possibility to turn into a
> product, so both portability and maintanability are issues.

Well, CGI isn't considered the best development environment. It isn't 
horrible though (unless performance is an issue...).The main advantage to 
CGI is that it's portable, and you don't want to go rewrite your app. One 
thing you might do is write your program in python, and use libraries to 
handle everything. That way if you do need to put it on something 
unexpected, you can just rewrite a few lines. 

> On the other hand, Mark also meant CGI/Apache, writting Python/Apache,
> right?

Not necessarily. If you think you'll at least be able to install some 
software on the target webserver, you could use mod_python. Use the 
publisher handler, and read the simple docs on the publisher handler (a 
part of mod_python) and the cgi module (thats a python module with 
routines that are useful for any web programming, not just CGI).

Or, you might want to stick with python CGIs. CGIs seem safer, because I 
don't see as many possible problems or stumbling blocks.If it get's turned 
into some other software later, it will be easy to change it from CGI to 
something else if you code defensively.

Regards,
        Jeff