From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-05-08T07:23:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is PHP so popular?  What can we learn from the PHP camp?

On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 11:11:30PM +0900, Rasputin wrote:
> Client side Java - particularly GUI code - is absolutely awful.
> 'Write once, debug everywhere'. Life's too short.
> 
> Server-side, it's a different story. The servlet API is a joy to use, and
> speedwise it p*sses all over CGI. - being able to initialise your DB
> connection when the server boots then re-use it is a real boon.

I've seen some *real* bad server-based Java/servlet/Tomcat applications -
servers needing to be kicked several times per day. Maybe I've been unlucky,
and there are good solutions out there too.

> IMO, ruby appservers are the way to go, rather than a CGI-based approach
> have persistent objects on the server, and spawn a new thread for each client.
> The servlet model is A Good Thing for OOP code, as opposed to a
> 'when the client connects fork off a shell with this in' legacy approach. 

You can go this way with Ruby easily enough: Webrick supports this sort of
'servlet' approach.

My personal favourite du jour is FastCGI. Each app has a pool of processes
handling one request at a time: this means that thread interactions are not
a concern, and it helps concurrency especially with databases (Ruby's
cooperative threading means that the whole interpreter blocks if one thread
has issued a slow query and is waiting for the response, for example; it's
not a problem if the queries are issued from separate processes)

You still end up working with the CGI model of stateless request-response,
but at least it's familiar :-) I think I would like the Borges/Seaside
approach using continuations, if I could understand it properly.

Regards,

Brian.