In no particular order, and splitting hairs some of the time...
Sounded like mod_backhand was best used NOT in the same Apache as a phat
application server (eg. mod_perl), because you don't want memory-heavy
processes sitting waiting for responses. You'd be better off with a
separate switching machine - or serve your static content from
machine(s) that know to backhand dynamic requests to a phat machine. I
think that's what Theo reckoned...
Interesting how many people were doing things that were really *simple*,
but effective. PHP is very popular. It makes easy things easy (but I
have a horrible feeling that it makes hard things impossible). People
always give examples with ASP, PHP etc of "what CGI scripts looked like
before embedded scripting" - C or Perl scripts with lots of print
"<blah>...\n";
USE TEMPLATES GODDAMNIT!
There's a CPAN module for that.
Well, several. Uh... :(
"make simple things easy, and hard things possible" -
What concerns me about systems like AxKit & Cocoon is that they may make
simple things complex, and some hard things possible. But this is a
naive comment not based on trying to build rilly big systems with them.
Perl, maybe, doesn't make simple things anything like as easy as PHP.
(Again, a naive comment that may be incorrect)
Douglas Adams, who spoke at ApacheCon, previously made an interesting
BBC documentary on hypermedia & its possibilities, in about 1992. Ted
Nelson, I think it was, realised that the ability to _include stuff from
other sources in your documents_ was important, and called it a
"transclusion" (though that concept, IIRC, may have included the
propagation of nanopayments to the source - not sure).
And at Apachecon, the XML guys say: "This Document() function's really
cool! You can build a portal very easily..." And after falling asleep
(reflex on hearing /portal/, marketing allergy) I thought, it's
syndication/transclusion again. Evidently, a big idea. But a big idea
buried in a heap of other big ideas.
</ramble>
Cheers
--
Tim Sweetman
A L Digital
"How many fates turn around in the overtime?"
--- Tori Amos, "The Mythical Man-Month"
