Communicating with a PHP script (and pretending I'm a browser)

[Larry Martell]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Joel Goldstick
<joel.goldstick at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 10:54 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 2:48 AM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Is there some way python can communicate like curl ... it needs to
>>>> send the request string in the body of a POST request to the URL that
>>>> will route to the PHP script and get the output back.
>>>
>>> That is possible, but probably more effort than it's worth. It'll
>>> likely be easier to just do the translation all at once.
>>
>> I would tend to agree, but that's not what my client wants. Also, it's
>> A LOT of PHP code so it does make some small amount of sense.
>
> Is your client technically savvy? If not, then what is he paying you
> for? It sounds like he may be paying you to implement his bad idea.
> Maybe you can outline a better approach that he can buy into

They are technically savvy. They are a 100% PHP shop. They have a big,
complicated app that they've been working on for 10 years. No one
there knows python or django. They want to put some new frontends on
their app. I was bought in for another project (involving Google Tag
Manager and Google Analytics), which I completed. Then they asked me
about this project. I told them they should redo their app in Flask or
Django. It took some cajoling, but they eventually said OK. But then a
few days later they said before I went off and reimplemented
everything in python, could I just build the new frontend and call the
existing PHP code. This would enable them to get the new frontends out
to their clients sooner, and then I could go back and port the PHP to
python. I don't see what is so wrong with that.