Hello everyone, I would like to announce Spiffy version 5.0. It's the first major release to have come out in 3 years. The main feature is that most of the extra handlers that used to be shipped with Spiffy have been moved out of the main distribution, making it lean and mean and quicker to install. The only additional module that's still shipped (mostly for administrator convenience) is the simple-directory-handler.
Don't be afraid, these handlers have found new homes and I don't intend to stop maintaining them immediately. The SSP handler and web-scheme-handler will eventually be completely deprecated, but I don't want to drop them immediately just in case someone is still using them. I've even finally gotten around to writing some (basic) regression tests for these handlers to help maintenance easier. The CGI handler has been merged with Andy's FastCGI handler, which he recently posted to this list and has now turned into a full-fledged egg called "spiffy-cgi-handlers". Because CGI is not generally useful and quite old-fashioned (FastCGI being much faster and also pretty widely supported), I think it's good to move it out of the core distribution, and keeping it together with the fastcgi handler makes sense to me. The old and crusty ssp-handler and web-scheme-handler have been retired to a separate "spiffy-dynamic-handlers" egg. These two handlers were marked as deprecated for quite a while now, and were becoming a growing annoyance in the back of my mind. As my knowledge of the web has advanced, I've become very much disenchanted with the "easy to use" PHP-like model of deploying web applications. This is inherently harder to secure than servlet-like approaches because the document root is (usually) where these files are stored, conflating static file storage with script execution path. Not saying it can't be used securely, just that it requires extra attention that is often forgotten, which makes it especially dangerous for the typical beginning web programmer who might not know much about writing secure code yet. Finally, I don't think Scheme is a suitable language for amateur web scripting anyway, so we don't really need this "ease of use" where you can start with a HTML file and start hacking code into it. Inline code inside HTML really isn't the proper way to develop clean code. Even the PHP folks have realised this. Modern "best practice" PHP code rarely contains any HTML in it anymore, except maybe for a handful of templates which might even be processed by a preprocessor like Haml or Smarty instead. Especially now that we have better eggs like the great "awful" egg, various spiffy dynamic dispatchers and the whole family of SXML tools, there is very little reason to keep these ugly handlers around. If you're still using these handlers, please consider switching to something more mature. Cheers, Peter -- http://sjamaan.ath.cx -- "The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music." -- Donald Knuth _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users