I agree completely that writing a FastCGI client is almost as hard as writing an HTTP client, so having a different protocol is gratuitous. See mongrel2 and pu

I agree completely that writing a FastCGI client is almost as hard as writing an HTTP client, so having a different protocol is gratuitous. See mongrel2 and pushpin as things that can connect to long-running services that speak HTTP over zmq. Neither will manage the worker processes the way Apache could with fastcgi though.