Re: [users@httpd] standing naked at the door of infinity with only a  butterknife

[rc...@xmission.com]

 
On Saturday 27 December 2003 13:40, Brian Dessent wrote: 
> In terms of the "How does it all fit together" part, here's my quick 
> overview.  Apache is the main server which coordinates all the 
> activities.  Apache itself typically does not do any actual processing, 
> although it can with some of its add-on modules.  But usually Apache is 
> either there to just serve static files from disk or to act as a gateway 
> (CGI) for some other language or application.  You can use almost any 
> conceivable language out there to do this.  The most popular are Perl 
> and PHP, which are both interpreted scripting languages.  They are 
> somewhat similar in that they share a lot of familiar ideas, but they 
> each have their own quirks and traits.  Other scripting languages that 
> are seeing more use are Python and Ruby, but really anything can be 
> used, including any compiled language.  You can read about the CGI 
> specification on the NCSA site, but essentially it amounts to stdout of 
> your application gets sent to the client (browser), and some information 
> is passed through environment variables and the command line arguments. 
> It's really pretty straightforward, but that doesn't mean it's 
> necessarily best to re-invent the wheel.  By that I mean it's certainly 
> *possible* to write web apps in C but almost nobody would do that unless 
> they were absolutely forced to.  The reason is that while C is certainly 
> fast and efficient, it lacks a great deal of functionality that must 
> either be implemeted by you or a library.  Furthermore, scripting 
> languages don't need to be compiled so they are very simple to 
> distribute, install, and require little porting to be cross-platform. 
> You would also be amazed at how much functionality has already been 
> written for you in Perl or PHP (see for example CPAN) in terms of 
> modules that you just drop in for whatever task you have to perform. 
> The other issue is that C code can be riddled with security flaws (such 
> as buffer overruns) which is especially relevent to web apps since they 
> accept input directly from the end user's client, so they must be 
> hardened to those sorts of common errors. 
> 
 
You might also consider Java. It is not a scripting language, but for 
heavier duty web programming it has a lot going for it including 
Servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP), and a lot of great supporting 
infrastructure and frameworks such as Tomcat, Struts, ad infinitum. 

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