On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:09 AM, Alvaro Lopez Ortega <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 01-dic-08, at 19:25, Christopher Grebs wrote: >> I'm planning to push my whole infrastructure over to a Cherokee >> based setup. But since there are many wsgi applications running I >> would be pleased to let them run in the same way I did with my >> apache setup. But with all advantages Cherokee provides (Load >> Balancing, easy Administration etc.). I know that WSGI-Based >> applications can run without any code patching on CGI/SCGI/FastCGI >> and so on... But the way WSGI handles just everything is ingenious. > > Well, WSGI is certainly a really interesting thing. It allows > developer to write web applications without having to worry about the > protocol it uses underneath to communicate with the web server. That's > a very good thing, actually.
Ah this is a very important distinction that I think confuses many people coming from a mod_wsgi vs. FastCGI world. Proxying/FastCGI/SCGI all define a language/platform agnostic protocol for relaying HTTP requests & responses between a frontend server and backend applications. WSGI[1] defines a common Python interface for web applications. Think of it as the thinnest possible web framework. Many (most? hopefully all?) Python web frameworks implement WSGI. However, these frameworks may in turn use FastCGI/SCGI to actually communicate with the frontend web server because WSGI isn't a protocol. Its an API. So think of mod_wsgi as mod_python + a builtin WSGI API (although this is an analogy, *not* a technical description!). Maybe we should call it "Mod Python: WSGI Edition." ;-) If you really like the idea of having HTTP + Python in the same process, use a Python HTTP server like CherryPy[2] to replace Apache+mod_wsgi in your stack. Then simply Proxy HTTP requests between CherryPy & Cherokee. Running a busy site on a multi-core server? Simply start multiple CherryPy instances and let Cherokee load balance between them. Need to scale more? Move the CherryPy instances to other servers and keep Cherokee as the load balancer. There was a good demonstration of this principle at PyCon a few years ago.[3] You could always use Apache+mod_wsgi behind Cherokee while you migrate. It would be the same as the CherryPy solution but with the HTTP & WSGI bits implemented in C instead of Pure Python.[4] If you don't really care about HTTP & Python living in the same process (I'm guessing you really just like how easy mod_wsgi is to setup compared to say, mod_python), take a deep breath and switch to FastCGI/SCGI. :-) Disclaimer: Like I've mentioned before. I'm no FastCGI/WSGI pro. Just someone going through the same thought process as the OP. :-) [1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333/\ [2] http://cherrypy.org [3] http://www.polimetrix.com/pycon/slides/ _______________________________________________ Cherokee mailing list [email protected] http://lists.octality.com/listinfo/cherokee
