[Seaside] Apache frontend for Squeak, mod_scgi ?

Jimmie Houchin jhouchin at texoma.net
Fri Sep 26 13:05:05 CEST 2003


My apologies for a general Squeak web question. But it seems this is 
where most of the web developers for Squeak are. :)

I am currently building a website.
I would like to use Squeak but am concerned about performance and 
stability. Due to that I am seriously (reasonably so) considering using 
Apache and Python, Quixote to be specific.
http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/

As the sole implementor of this site I like the philosophy of Quixote.

Much of the performance of Quixote is from using Apache as the webserver 
instead of a Python based server. The most popular means of achieving 
that is via mod_scgi.
http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/scgi/
Version 1.2a is available for Apache 1.3 and 2.0.4x
http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/files/scgi/

This is the platform LWN uses and achieves good performance, handles 
Slashdotting, etc.

I would like that for Squeak.

 From my understanding there is 2 parts to SCGI. The Apache module and 
the client-side code in this case called scgi_server.py. It is only a 
268 line file including comments (in the 1.1 version). It appears to be 
using Netstrings of which Stephen Pair has a Squeak implementation.

I believe something like this would help Squeak in web development.
Unfortunately I am not currently qualified to port this to Squeak. It 
might not take someone who is knowledgeable very long to implement. I 
would fund it but my funds are not much. I am currently funding my 
server (purchasing next week) and deployment costs. When my site is 
profitable I could fund it, but then it would be after the fact. 
However, I could offer a small amount toward such, with it released to 
the community.

I think Apache, mod_scgi, and Squeak could outperform Apache, mod_scgi, 
and Python. I don't know how this compares to mod_lisp. But mod_lisp 
also isn't available for Apache2 to my knowledge.

Thoughts, opinions, offers, takers?

Thanks.

Jimmie Houchin



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