SPUG: Java, Perl, large-scale projects
Marc M. Adkins
Marc.M.Adkins at Doorways.org
Fri Jun 14 14:18:48 CDT 2002
> > When I worked at cobalt in Jan 2000, there was a 'big push for
> java'. The
> > basis I was told was that it leaks to much for modperl, and they are
> > spending a fortune in hardware. The performance of the code
> was terrible.
> The vast majority of the sites are still using perl. I don't know
> about the
> other groups, but Chrysler isn't doing mod_perl, we're doing straight
> template-based CGI. Otherwise it WOULD be impossible to maintain
> everything.
> As it is we have master scripts that generate the websites in
> general, then
> we can make changes to specific websites as necessary.
I thought I would mention a another option for using Perl to serve web
pages: www.fastcgi.com. FastCGI is a mechanism for developing stand-alone
web application generators that handle page requests for the web server in a
different process.
Basically, the web server gets the page request and sends it on to one of a
pool of processes, which does the work and returns the response through the
web server. It's been cleverly designed to provide a coding environment
just like CGI (environment variables and open STDXXX pipes) so existing CGI
code can be ported very quickly.
Because it is a stand-alone process, the cgi startup time (opening database
connections and the like) isn't an issue. Because it is a separate process
(not in the web server process space) you can do things like kill the
process periodically and let the operating system reclaim the memory.
There are plug-ins for Apache (mod_fastcgi), ISAPI, NSAPI, and a couple of
lesser-known HTTP servers that provide FastCGI support directly. In
addition, FastCGI is language-independent. The basic library is in C and
there are bindings for C, C++, Scheme, Eiffel, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby,
TCL, and Smalltalk.
It's free. It comes with source code.
Some potentially negative aspects:
* There is apparently one guy supporting the core library,
the language bindings are provided by other people.
* It comes out of a commercial firm, which retains copyright,
though the license seems friendly enough.
* The current load-balancing scheme isn't session-friendly.
The next version, promised real soon now for a while, will supposedly
support Apache 2.0 and provide support for sessions.
I'm not selling anything here. Just pointing out a tool that can help in
some situations.
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