4 ms·

FastCGI was the standardized approach. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683304 ("FastCGI – The Fo

by tpmx 6y ago

FastCGI was the standardized approach. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683304 ("FastCGI – The Forgotten Treasure (2002)")

tyingq 6y ago
Sure. Wikipedia mentions FastCGI initially being a reaction to NSAPI. "Open Market originally developed FastCGI in part as a competitive response to Netscape's proprietary, in-process application programming interfaces (APIs) (Netscape Server Application Programming Interface (NSAPI)) for developing Web applications"
- tpmx 6y ago
  Oh, I'm showing my ignorance here - I didn't know NSAPI was in-process. The Netscape server software was expensive and kinda hard to find in Europe back then. I guess FastCGI was an improvement in terms of stability - I'm assuming the NSAPI was .so/.dll-based? So if you messed up, the entire server went down. Back in the mid 90s I worked on the Spinner/Roxen webserver that was built on an interpreted C-like language modelled after the LPC language being used for MUDs. Modules were were run in-process, but because of the interpretation a failure resulted in an exception/error, rather than a full crash. This software didn't get very popular - we sucked at marketing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Most people kept the in-process stuff down to something that worked like Fast-CGI, just proxying requests to some non-NSAPI persistent process over a socket.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      Somehow this ended up at Oracle? That's just nasty. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19146-01/821-1833/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19146-01/821-1833/index.html
      - tyingq 6y ago
        Yes. Sun/Netscape co-owned the iPlanet brand and products, Oracle bought Sun. AOL still has iPlanet rights though, so it's actually in two places. Tricky to follow where all the stuff ended up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPlanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPlanet
  - ipython 6y ago
    I loved spinner! It was one of my favorite web servers, even if I never did learn enough pike to do anything useful. But the graphical web server configuration interface was amazing for its time.

by tpmx 6y ago

FastCGI was the standardized approach. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683304 ("FastCGI – The Forgotten Treasure (2002)")

tyingq 6y ago

Sure. Wikipedia mentions FastCGI initially being a reaction to NSAPI. "Open Market originally developed FastCGI in part as a competitive response to Netscape's proprietary, in-process application programming interfaces (APIs) (Netscape Server Application Programming Interface (NSAPI)) for developing Web applications"

tpmx 6y ago
Oh, I'm showing my ignorance here - I didn't know NSAPI was in-process. The Netscape server software was expensive and kinda hard to find in Europe back then. I guess FastCGI was an improvement in terms of stability - I'm assuming the NSAPI was .so/.dll-based? So if you messed up, the entire server went down. Back in the mid 90s I worked on the Spinner/Roxen webserver that was built on an interpreted C-like language modelled after the LPC language being used for MUDs. Modules were were run in-process, but because of the interpretation a failure resulted in an exception/error, rather than a full crash. This software didn't get very popular - we sucked at marketing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tyingq 6y ago
  Most people kept the in-process stuff down to something that worked like Fast-CGI, just proxying requests to some non-NSAPI persistent process over a socket.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Somehow this ended up at Oracle? That's just nasty. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19146-01/821-1833/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19146-01/821-1833/index.html
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Yes. Sun/Netscape co-owned the iPlanet brand and products, Oracle bought Sun. AOL still has iPlanet rights though, so it's actually in two places. Tricky to follow where all the stuff ended up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPlanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPlanet
- ipython 6y ago
  I loved spinner! It was one of my favorite web servers, even if I never did learn enough pike to do anything useful. But the graphical web server configuration interface was amazing for its time.