A simple, embedded web-interface – part 1

There’s an old application that needs some updating at work. It’s little more
than a view onto a database, but it was written before we all using
web-interfaces for that sort of thing, so it has a clunky MFC GUI.
Unfortunately, this means that a user has to be logged into the machine to
use the application, which often means a physical visit to the server room for
our customers, and they’re finding that unacceptable. And since our customers are
banks, their server rooms are even less accessable than usual.

Providing a web interface to this application seems like a good idea. It would
allow remote access to the application, and we could use SSL to secure the
traffic. For reasons that are clear only to the original developers, the client
applications that need access to this database do so not through SQL, but by
making DCOM calls to a service running on the database server. This has proven
to be a major pain – DCOM security is very difficult to work with. Ultimately,
it would probably be better to re-write the clients to access that data using
the SQL Server network client driver, but if we used web services, the model
would be very similar to the current DCOM model, without having to mess around
with DCOM security.

We are, sadly, a Microsoft shop, and it would in theory be possible to use
ASP/IIS. But, a) we don’t want to force the customers to install IIS on the
server and b) I don’t really know ASP. I prefer to work in Python anyway, and
I’m doing this on my time. So Python it is.

Next up, some ideas for the solution.