Executing arbitrary command line on server?

Hi -- I'm in the process of evaluating SmartClient for our needs. Basically, we're looking to write a webform to generate command lines for our software (which is written in python, if that presents possibilities) and then execute the command line on our server. Because this is not a typical usage case for website design, it's harder to find answers to questions (especially since I've never designed a website before and am still learning the lingo)...

So my question is this. How do you recommend running an arbitrary command line on my server? i.e. prepare data, send data to server, run command, and return data. I'm not necessarily looking to interact with a running process on the server machine.

Here's what I've seen (to prove I've been reading the manual!) that might be adaptable to my needs:
1) It looks like maybe I could call an arbitrary cgi script. Would I integrate this with an RPC actionURL?
2) Use a RestDataSource. It looks like this deals with I/O on files, and not executables.
3) Use DMI. The problem with this appears to be that it requires writing java code which seems an unnecessarily complicated way of doing an `exec` statement. I'm also not certain how security works -- whether `exec` statements are even permitted.

Thanks for any advice!