Managing an entire .htaccess seemed a bit big to bite off at once (since I didn't remember that much about the format), so I decided to get htpasswd/htgroup-file managment out of the way first. A simple little webapp emerged, named SWAMI (Simple Web Authorizaion Management Interface).
As I was writing it, I decided it would be cool to make it nice and RESTful, because one of the side effects of doing so is that it makes sure I don't forget anything. So I reorganized the code some and made the URI space and actions RESTful. As I was doing so, I found it annoying to rewrite a bunch of the same if-then statements over and over, so I decided to refactor the code into a framework. I've done this before in a different context, and I spent some time looking at Tarawa, so I soon had something simple and flexible. This framework then got moved into its own library, which I called pyward (Python Web App RESTful Dispatcher).
So now I've got this RESTful framework which at the moment deals with being a CGI but could easily be bolted onto the side of an HTTPServer class.
