I think you just need different techniques for Python than for C. You can write a dummy view that calls dir() on the request object (which will probably tell you how to get the POST data), asks it for its __class__, asks it or its __class__ for their __module__, asks for sys.modules[request.__module__].__file__, and so on. If you just want to know what's in the request object, rather than what its methods are, you can get its __dict__ and print that out, and then you get not just the type of its contents, but an actual example. When you have a REPL and an example of an object, you can call help() on the object and get generally pretty good documentation on And there's the inspect module, like LordLandon_ pointed out, but which I didn't know about. And when the going really gets tough, you can monkeypatch random libraries to change the way they work (e.g. to add logging) in order to debug the problem. All of the above applies to Python development in general, not just Django.

Django in particular has several additional advantages:

• it has an "interact" mode that pops you into a Python REPL so you can poke at all of this stuff interactively instead of having to save a source file and hop over to your browser;

• it has really first-class documentation;

• if you raise an exception in debug mode, the traceback includes dumps of all of the objects mentioned on all the levels of the traceback stack, along with a few lines of source code from the stack frame;

In short, Python offers much more power to undertake the kind of analysis you were wanting to do than C or C++, but you have to do it dynamically, instead of statically.