Hi,

Recently I've been researching existing Apache modules that connect various
systems and back end application engines to the Apache web server. I've
come across FastCGI and I think it's the best and quickest way for the
Smalltalk community to get Smalltalk and Apache (and other web servers)
connected together. It also should result in a highly portable implemention
since the source could ALL be written in Smalltalk code!

I think that the FastCGI protocol is simple enough that it could be
imlemented at the next Camp Smalltalk (or even before if the community gets
ambitious).

What is FastCGI?
"FastCGI is a language independent, scalable, open extension to CGI that
provides high performance and persistence without the limitations of server
specific APIs. ... FastCGI applications use TCP sockets to communicate with
the web server. This scalable architecture allows applications to run on
the same platform as the web server or on many machines scattered across an
enterprise network. ... FastCGI applications are fast because they're
persistent. There is no per-request startup and initialization overhead.
This makes possible the development of applications which would otherwise
be impractical within the CGI paradigm (e.g. a huge Perl script, or an
application which requires a connection to one or more databases)."

Checkout the links at: http://mod.smalltalk.org.

All the best,

Peter William Lount, peter at smalltalk.org
http://www.smalltalk.org