> At 14:33 19.06.2001 +0530, you wrote:
> >Is there something in SSI which cant be done in a better way using Perl
> >??
>
> Yes.
>
> 1. SSI with XBitHack full plays the 304 game for me. Every time the
catalog
> database is updated, its SSI frame gets a touch. Thats it. Simple.
Efficient.
>
> 2. SSI provides a way to modularize "static" HTML. I have lots of small
> HTML snippets. Many of them are generated by a content manager. These
> snippets are put together using SSI.
>
> 3. Performance.
Most of the perl templating systems would be just as good on these points,
and would allow you to catch errors if you are willing to wait until the
whole document is generated before sending. They also perform about the
same, with Apache::SSI actually beating mod_include in my benchmarks.
However, SSI has one thing going for it, and that's memory usage. It
doesn't cache pages in memory (neither the C or Perl version), so it doesn't
grow as it processes new pages. (Well, it grows to the size of the biggest
single page processed.) This means you can use it on a site with thousands
of unique pages and not worry that all of them will end up cached in memory
for each mod_perl process.
I think the original question on this thread was how to post-process CGI
output through SSI. I've done this using Apache::SSI, just collecting my
output in a string and then feeding it to Apache::SSI, which provides a
method you can call for this. You could also look at CGI::SSI_Parser, which
I have not used.
- Perrin
