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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

by 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.