Well, that's one aborted idea

I spent about thirty minutes trying to grok the code for MySQL Connector/J earlier today, and I ended up giving up on it. I was trying to read it in order to get an understanding of what you have to do to write a something that can communicate directly with MySQL as part of a preliminary investigation into writing a new Python driver for MySQL. To do it right would require me to learn far more about all of the options that MySQL has, and the ins and outs of how MySQL works to ever be worth it, so I just gave up. Doesn't seem to be any harm in that, in my opinion. I just don't have the energy to bring myself to care enough to try something like that, especially since I don't even have any side projects that would require a pure Python driver. The current driver unfortunately relies on a foundation written in C, which makes it a non-starter for mixing into web applications written in Python. A shame, really.

On a different note, one thing that might be useful as web applications go is a supplemental XML-RPC API for Movable Type that allows you to hook into proprietary features like rebuilding pages and such. That and a Python API that wraps it on the server side might be worth looking at.