Quoting Jan Labanowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Guys,
> You are getting religious about CGI... Religious is good, but I worry
> that it is a cult {:-)}. CGI was a good thing for last 6 years, and it is a
> still good thing sometimes.
CGI is a technically _horrible_ solution. The entire process model is
fundamentally flawed. As far as scaling is concerned, it would be the
functional equivalent of me synchronizing all access to my middle-tier objects.
> Note, we have tons of legacy perl software around,
IMNSHO, legacy code is the only legitimate reason anyone should run CGI
anymore. This is 2001.
> and believe me, I can sometimes do more in one line of perl, than
> in a page of Java.
Don't even get me started on my personal feelings about Perl =)
<rant target="Perl">
It's a nice language, and it definitely has some areas where it really shines,
but it is, after all, a niche language. It is very efficient at what it does,
but it has been extended WAY beyond its design. This whole trip about Perl
being "the only language you'll ever need" (I'm not quoting you, just your
average Perl nut) ... I've heard that line with just about every new language
that has ever come out, and Perl is much less suited to be my "only language"
than almost all of the previously-touted "do-all languages".
As far as the tired old "I can do more in one line of Perl than a mountain of
{pick a language}" ... there's an old saying about Perl: Perl is the only
language that looks the same before AND after encryption.
Perl can always seem to wash my car, feeds my cats, take my girlfriend out to
dinner, and get me a beer, all in a single line of code. All I know is, while
that may be true, if I ever have to end up maintaining one of these 1000-
character lines of code (that resemble what is left on my screen after my cat
walks across the keyboard), I'm hunting down the guy that wrote it.
</rant>
> Yes, CGI is an "old ways", but it will be here for a long time, since there
> is so much stuff written in it.
That is true, and is the only reason I personally wouldn't like to see it
removed from Tomcat altogether.
> I did not look carefully at regexp Java syntax, but can you have a
> s/\b(\d+\.?\d*)C\b/int($1 * 1.8 +32) . "F"/e substitution in Java?
Again with my cat on the keyboard ;-)
Anyway, as Mark pointed out, that's what jakarta-regexp is for.
> I personally think that web server without CGI is not a fully
> operational Web server. End of story...
And I suppose that a computer with COBOL support libraries installed is not a
fully-operational computer. Bottom line: CGI is a dead technology, and
thankfully so. It was a nice hack in the beginning of time, but it outlived its
usefulness three years ago, and that's being generous.
> This is GREAT that CGI is available in Tomcat.
That's highly debatable =)
> You should avoid it, but sometimes, if you have a week to move from Apache to
> Tomcat, you just cannot do it, and you need a way to move from CGI to
> servlets/jsp in an organized way.
Agreed. I would have to grudgingly agree that CGI support in Tomcat makes sense
if only to support legacy code. Anyone writing new CGI programs to be run on a
Servlet/JSP engine, however, is certifiable.
- Christopher
