Poor man's Web services with HTTP POST

I use HTTP POST as a lightweight mechanism for posting test results to a central location. I have tests running on various clients/platforms/OSes, and I need a way to keep track of the results of those tests. For this, I have an Apache server running CGI scripts that talk to a Firebird database. By using HTTP POST from the clients to the Apache server, I keep things simple, because the clients don't need to have any database bindings or drivers installed. In fact, all the clients need to know is how to open a socket on port 80 to the Web server.

This can be looked at as a poor man's Web service mechanism.

Here is the http_post function I'm using:

def http_post(data, cgi_cmd, webserver=""):
     if not webserver:
         webserver = "mywebserver.mydomain.com"
     if type(data) == type(u''): # unicode
         data = data.encode('iso-8859-1')

     sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
     try:
         sock.connect((webserver, 80))
     except:
         print "Error: Could not connect to " + webserver
         return

     url = "http://%s/cgi-bin/%s" % (webserver, cgi_cmd)

     sock.send("POST %s HTTP/1.0\n" % url)
     sock.send("Accept: */*\n")
     sock.send("User-Agent: http_post_mechanism\n")
     sock.send("Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\n")
     sock.send("Content-Length: %d\n\n" % len(data))
     sock.send(data)
     while 1:
         response = sock.recv(8192)
         if not response: break
         output = response
     sock.close()

Hello Piggies

I thought it would be a good idea to get a blog for the SoCal Piggies (Southern California Python Interest Group). This will be a "team blog", where all us Piggies will be able to post. I hope we will all contribute by posting for example short "Python tips and tricks" that can make our lives easier as Python users.