simple cgi 'system'?

[gabor]

hi,

i'm developing an application which many times downloads differents
stuff from http.

for this i'd need a quick way to create a cgi to for example return
always error 503. so that i can test my program if it handles this error
correctly or not.

because the program is in java, i usually create a small servlet, but i
thought that maybe python would be easier.

what is the easiest way to create a cgi?
i know about the cgi module, but most of times i need something a little
higher level.

usually i only want to specify for example that the cgi should fail with
error 503, i don't want to print all the header stuff manually.

any ideas?

gabor