On most of our servers, we serve uploads from a native server: Apple
PWS on Macs, Apache on Linux. Visit any of the Swikis on
http://herring.cc.gatech.edu:8080/ to see what I mean -- the two
servers run on different ports.
Mark
>On Sun, 14 May 2000, Gerardo Richarte wrote:
>
> > Hi!
> >
> > It's late, and I'm tired, and I'm wondering if it's a good idea to
> > have a separate server (standard-apache, let's say) to serve uploads
> > and uploaded files...
>
>A mixed strategy (i.e., Comanche + something else) does seem like a good
>idea at this stage of things. Particularly for lots of static files per
>page (like the nav page on ComSwiki). Not that this is a slight against
>the (beta, *version 1*, about a *year* old) Comanche. Indeed, when I think
>of it, I really have to take my hat off to Bolot and Stephan Pair.
>
>Nevertheless, for example, it still seems that the socket prims are not
>the aces, at least on every platform (aside from what tuning can be done
>in comanche---e.g., does Comanche support keep-alive connections yet;
>there's code, I think, to be gotten from the Camp Smalltalk effort.
>
> > We'll need only to code a small cgi (that I'll gladly do, if this
> > is a good idea) to run on the standard server, export files as ftp and
> > http (why not?), and change some templates to point to the correct
> > places...
>
>I believe the GaTech swikis (some at least) are already using a mixed
>strategy to handle, e.g., the nav bar files.
>
> > According to The Paper (STOMP comes to my mind, by I know it's not
> > the name... sorry, I can't find it now) this would give a good
> > speed-up to Comanche, without loosing to much flexibility... or not?
>
>No, STOMP it is. I don't have the paper before me at the moment, but a
>major reason for the dual strategy is handling multiple simultaneous
>requests corrected. Once you've done it for that, you may as well do it
>for the uploads and downloads ;)
>
> > Is anybody doing this? Comanche and Apacche can run on the same or
> > different machine (you can also share file systems if you'd like to).
>
>See above. I'll be working on making Comanch and Apache play more or less
>seamlessly together over the next couple of weeks.
>
>(Basically, at http://monkeyfist.com, we want to be able to use Swiki's
>and custom comanche apps. But we're not ready to flip the switch all the
>way (i.e., our current CMS is a bunch of PHP scripts talking to
>MySQL, and I'm the only Squeak/Smalltalk guy, so moving entirely to such a
>implementation is going to go by slow stages :)). Originally, we were
>going to just run Commanche off a another port (e.g., 8080--this is how
>we're handling crit, IIRC), but there are a number of reasons why that's
>unsatisfactory for us (mostly because it makes for really yucky permanant
>urls and we want people to point into the Comanche server pages). It looks
>like mod_redirect will do the job for us. The other strategem is to use
>OSProcesses to communicate with a Squeak process---sorta a visualwave
>strategy (Bolot, the visualwave docs are very interesting...the do a lot
>with load balancing and other server farmish style stuff).
>
>The key to making that work is getting a sensible CGIrequest and
>CGIresponse working. Now, assuming that I understand Comanche's current
>set of apps, it won't be as simple as popping these in for the http
>varients, since converstion is done on a per module basis.
>
>Hmm. Yes. SwikiRequest is a subclass of HttpRequest. Yuck. Wouldn't it be
>better to isolate the application specific request/responses from the
>*protocal* varients? That way, you'd only need to write conversion methods
>when adding a protocal (e.g., SwikiRequest>>fromHttpRequst:,
>SwikiRequest>>fromCgiRequest:, SwikiRequest>>fromMorphicEvent,
>etc.). Hmm. The numeric classes come to mind again (SwikiResponse
>adaptToHttp, or HttpRequest adaptTo: SwikiModule).
>
>Cheers,
>Bijan.
--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
