See the previous sections, starting with the first on finding an ancient CGI script.

We don't need an OpenAPI specification. But, it is so helpful to formalize the behavior of a web site that it's hard for me to imagine working without it.

In this case, the legacy script only …

Be sure to see the original script and the test cases in the prior posts.

We need to understand a little about what a web request is. This can help us do the refactoring.

It can help to think of a web server a function that maps a request to …

See "We have an ancient Python2 CGI script -- what do we do?" The previous post in this series provides an overview of the process of getting rid of legacy code.

Here's some code. I know it's painfully long; the point is to provide a super-specific, very concrete example of what …

This was a shocking email: the people have a Python 2 CGI script. They needed advice on Python 2 to 3 migration.

Here's my advice on a Python 2 CGI script: Throw It Away.

A great deal of the CGI processing is part of the wsgi module, as well as …

It may be helpful to look back at 'How Managers Say "No"' which is about breaking the RDBMS Hegemony.

I got an email in which the simple concepts of "data manipulation" and "persistence" had become entangled with SQL DML to a degree that the conversation failed to make sense to …

See Apache Log Parsing for the background.

Here's a generator function which expands a simple Access to be a more detailed named tuple.

Access_Details= namedtuple( 'Access_Details',
    ['access', 'time', 'method', 'url', 'protocol'] )

def details_iter( iterable ):
    def parse_time_linux( ts ):
        return datetime.datetime.strptime( ts, "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z" )

    def …

How much do I love Python? Consider this little snippet that parses Apache logs.

import re
from collections import defaultdict, named tuple

format_pat= re.compile(
   r"(?P<host>[\d\.]+)\s"
   r"(?P<identity>\S*)\s"
   r"(?P<user>\S*)\s"
   r"\[(?P<time>.*?)\]\s"
   r'"(?P<request>.*?)"\s'
   r"(?P …

It seems so simple: use the HTTP Digest Authorization with the Quality of Protection set to "auth".

It's an easy algorithm. A nonce that encodes a timestamp can be used to be sure no one is attempting to cache credentials. It's potentially very, very nice.

Except for one thing: Apache …