Himanshu wrote:
A newbie question in the insightful thread. Can serving static files
and cookie authentication go together?
Yes. You can do this with something like mod_auth_tkt in a proxy web server (very light) and have a
backend mod_perl (or php, or Java, etc) server set the cookie after someone has logged in. Then you
just configure your auth in your proxy for which groups have access to which files.
Second what
are the sizes at which one should start moving to files. e.g. how
about plain text blog entries containing no more than say 5 KBytes.
It really depends on you database. In MySQL using BLOBS won't really cause
problems unless you use queries that involve full table scans or queries that actually pull or
manipulate the BLOBS a lot. So if you have the proper indexes and only pull the BLOBS rarely, then
you should be ok for most uses.
But as far as blogs go, you really shouldn't be pulling the text of the blog out of the DB for every
request. Since it changes very rarely, especially compared to the number of times it's read then
storing it in a "published" state on the filesystem is usually best. And if you still need to add
dynamic bits to the page at run time, then instead of publishing a .html file, you can publish a
template (for Template Toolkit, HTML::Template, etc).
--
Michael Peters
Plus Three, LP
