On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Tim Sweetman wrote:
> 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...
Yes, but the backend mod_perl servers are running backhand. So you have:
B B B B
\ | | /
\ \/ /
\|/
F
Where all the servers are running mod_backhand, but only F is publically
accessible. There may also be >1 F. Its in his slides, and is prettier
than the above :-)
> "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)
No, its correct, I think. I'd like to maybe next time do the second half
of the AxKit stuff as a Demo, but that takes some demo-able material thats
actually going to make you say "Ooh, that *is* easier than what I'm using
right now". So I'll work on it :-)
> 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.
Its all been done before. I spoke a bit to Rael Dornfest about P2P (Rael
is an O'Reilly guy behind the P2P summit). Basically its all the same
stuff we've already been doing, but its just a buzzword. But it often
takes buzzwords to make the world sit up and take notice and focus on the
right thing to be doing, even though they may not know it themselves!
--
<Matt/>
/|| ** Director and CTO **
//|| ** AxKit.com Ltd ** ** XML Application Serving **
// || ** http://axkit.org ** ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP **
// \\| // ** Personal Web Site: http://sergeant.org/ **
\\//
//\\
// \\
