From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2005-03-30T23:29:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Poor efficency of Ruby...

Austin Ziegler wrote:

> Um. Neat, but not quite what I meant ;)

Ah!  I thought you simply meant without the use of fastcgi or mod_ruby, and
with decent (for CGI) performance.  :)

> I'd love to have a framework that can run as app.cgi without
> independent processes.

The difficulty is that a framework implies a lot more stuff than, say, a
templating system, and some of that stuff takes some work to set itself up.

Take a templating system (Chris N's Kashmir, or Amrita2, or xtemplate, or
whatever), and run that with plain CGI, and performance will be fine, but
that's only a fraction of what a full framework delivers.  Mix in some sort
of session handling, like from CGI::Session, and you're capability expand,
and startup time for a plain CGI still isn't bad.  Start rolling in an ORM,
though, and things start slowing down because even the simplest ORMs do
quite a bit of dynamic setup at the start.

Still, for a db schema that's not large or complex, one could easily roll a
"framework" out of off the shelf tools like Kashmir, CGI::Session, and
Kansas (mentioned simply because I know it's startup can be fast; Og or AR
may work just as quickly for simple schema)and get adequate CGI-only
performance.  It won't have all of the bells and whistles that something
else might provide, but one would have an effective fraction of bells and
whistles without incurring high startup costs.


Just theorizing,

Kirk Haines