replacing ASP/VBScript with Python

[D H]

Peter Maas wrote:
> Peter Maas schrieb:
> 
>> I have inherited an extremely messy ASP/VBScript application which
>> is a pain for me to support. Now the customer is thinking about a
>> redesign. I'd like to rewrite the whole thing in Python but the app
>> has to meet some conditions like
>>
>> - IIS frontend
>> - MSSQL db server
>> - Win32 authentication
>> - No 'ugly' URLs like http://server/cgi-bin/frontend.cgi?main.py
>> - Performance: intranet with ~ 1000 users
> 
> 
> In the meantime I have searched the internet and found plenty of options:
> 
> - plain cgi with fastcgi and mod_rewrite for IIS to transform the URL
> - quixote cgi with fastcgi and mod_rewrite
> - Webware + wkcgi
> - Python ASP (registering Python with Pywin32 as ASP language)
> - mxODBC + SQL ODBC driver
> - pyADO + SQL MDAC driver
> 

Can those do Windows authentication though?  I guess you could with 
Python ASP.  If you really are stuck with ASP/IIS/Windows, then you 
might find using boo or ironpython easier since they work with .NET. 
I'm just saying it is an option, not that you shouldn't use CPython.

 > - I'd like to do session handling in Python because ASP's session
 >   object is quite limited and some of the ASP app's mess is caused
 >   by trying to use it for compound data type storage. OTOH I could
 >   pickle Python objects to a string and store that in an ASP session.

For storing complex data objects, instead of pickle, you can either use 
.NET serialization: http://boo.codehaus.org/XML+Serialization
or db4objects, a GPL tool: http://www.db4o.com/
There is a sample of using boo with db4o here: 
http://db4oboobrowser.sourceforge.net/
Or ORMs like Gentle.NET can work with MSSQL:
http://www.mertner.com/confluence/display/Gentle/Home