Smart Web Apps with IPC and threading

[Issac Goldstand <ma...@beamartyr.net>]

Since I started work on Apache::UploadMeter, I've started to look into 
the possibilities of creating smarter and more user-interactive webapps 
using IPC between webserver processes. Basically, the way this works is 
that you can open a "magic" URL at form submission/link-click time, 
which can be tied to a "slave" server, which can be instructed to 
provide any type of realtime feedback that you'd like - in the case of 
Apache::UploadMeter, the "magic" URL displays a snapshot of the upload 
process and reloads itself every X seconds, but form submissions can be 
done with this too.  The problem is that under Apache 1.3, that wouldn't 
work well due to the fact that each child process is just that: a 
standalone process.  And that's going to tie up a lot of servers and 
child processes, and basically make a big mess.
However, under the Apache 2 threading MPM, this wouldn't seem to be a 
problem - especially if there is good shared resources between the 
threads.  And mod_perl shouldn't be a problem either, as long as shared 
perl interpreters are used... So basically, I'd like to know if other 
people have any ideas that they'd  be interested in sharing, and just 
basically see if we could look at some of the new ways of designing 
webapps like this.
Looking forward to getting feedback,
  Issac

PS. I posted to this list because I'd like to hear from mod_perl users - 
not just developers or advocates - but if this gets way OT, let's move 
this thread to the appropriate place.