On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 13:04 -0400, Sam Carleton wrote: > On 3/26/07, Ralf Mattes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > And there _are_ response status that indicate a lengthy content > > generation ... > > Can you expand on this a bit more, what are the response status? I > have no problem looking them up to learn about them, I just need to > know what to look up;) >
Oh, how about: http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/Topics/102.htm This is really the most basic description of HTTP. Then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperText_Transfer_Protocol Which has a section 'Status codes'. If you want/need on-the-fly generation of images you might also be interested in 'Persistent connections' (and _do_ follow the link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_pipelining) The link section on the bottom of the page links to serveral tutorials. > > Since the OP seems to feel comfortable in C/C++ I'd write a custom > > handler module that generates the scaled image on the fly and saves it > > into a cache. > > Ralf, > > You are correct, I am very much at home in C/C++. Other then C#, > other languages are much less comfortable for me;) It looks like > there is a lot of infrastructure code that is needed when implementing > an apache handler module and a whole new "framework" to learn. Is the > work worth it compared to CGI (maybe FastCGI) for what I am doing? > That is the million dollar question I am seeking;) Depends on what you want to do. For a simple content handler (i.e. a module that _produces_ content (rather than modifies content)) the framework is actually rather lean. A simple: apxs -g -n fancy_image_handler will generate a sample module where you only need to fill in the actual content generation code. NOTE: iff this needs to be portable you _will_ need to dive into the APR documentation (APR is a framework/library that abstracts over OS dependend functionality - much easier than writing custom file system code for every supported OS). Is it worth the effort? Hard to tell - for a moderately busy system a trivial CGI program (i _hate_ to call'em scripts) will probably do. On a high volume site external processes start to become expensive (both in terms of process count as well as file descriptor usage. There _are_ limits for both ...). And as soon as you need locking (don't want to serve a _partially_ generated image, do you?) modules might be even simpler than CGIs. HTH RalfD > Sam
