Agreed, it's not the end of the world. The biggest headache I get from CGI-style app runtimes is that most do not allow me to open and use a database transactio

Agreed, it's not the end of the world. The biggest headache I get from CGI-style app runtimes is that most do not allow me to open and use a database transaction across multiple requests. They tend to be designed around the assumption that database connections are stateless that keeping one open is only effecting a sort of cache. If it's not clear why I'd want this, it can be nice for integration testing (each test happens inside a transaction, aborts the transaction to clean up after itself) and you can extend those transactions as a feature to your user interface, let users start a transaction begin making changes, interact with the domain model inside their transaction but still let them confirm or revert the set of changes, or in the typical usage where an exception of some kind reverts the transaction, but where the exception and the changes that the exception should cause to be aborted might occur in different requests.