-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Neven,
On 11/20/13, 11:48 AM, Neven Cvetkovic wrote: > Ultimately, CGI is a very old technology that had its own share of > performance (and security) problems. Usually, CGI scripts were > replaced with superior Java Servlet technology (or some other > better technology) and hence the need for Tomcat application server > (servlet container). Hopefully, the rest of the mailing list > members share my sentiments about the CGI :) - -0 The only thing that really makes CGI "outdated" is that CGI itself didn't have an API... or if you could call it an API, it was very basic. It basically said "you get the query string in a big blob and you can read standard input if you want to get the entity body". Then everyone set to work writing their own custom parsing routines. I remember copy/pasting stuff in Perl way back in 1994 and now having any idea what the code actually did. These days, you can pretty much write a Perl script and say "use CGI;" and it's just magic, safe, etc. CGI has come a long way. The last remaining problem is really that of performance: the CGI model launches a new process for each request (even though you can cheat a bit using things like mod_perl, etc.) and so there is a performance hit right there. If you want to keep information between requests, you have no choice but to write it to some form of non-volatile storage (as far as the "application" is concerned). RDBMS, flat file, etc. More recent systems (I hesitate to say "modern" because it implies that they are better simply because they are newer, and that the older methodologies are simply worse by definition) are supported by much more complicated software, APIs, etc. Note that container-based systems like Tomcat have their own performance problems: they have to manage all the stuff that they are ... well, required to support. If you peel-away all of the stuff that Apache httpd provides *aside* from the Common Gateway Interface, you are left with a server that primarily pumps bytes back and forth between the client and the script. Tomcat has all kinds of moving parts that make it possible to do nice things, but those moving parts have a cost. (It's worth noting that I believe such costs are worth it. That's why I live in the container-based world instead of writing Perl- or PHP-based applications.) Want to deploy a single "Hello, World!" CGI script? No problem. Just drop "#!/bin/sh\n\necho "Hello, World!" into a .cgi file in your document root and tell Apache httpd it's okay to run it. Want to deploy a single "Hello, World!" script on Tomcat? Well, first you have to know where the auto-deployment directory is (hint: it's not a document root), and then you have to create a directory in there, and then drop a .jsp file in there. The good news is that "Hello, World!" is a valid JSP file without any of the fluff you need to make a shell script run. But the small amount of orientation required just to get the point of dropping text into a file can be confusing. Once the almighty "container" is involved, there is pressure to make it do more things. Sessions. Replication. Websockets. These are all very good and very useful things, but it further complicates the scenario. It's just a tough world to jump into with little to no planning. - -chris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.15 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJSjrUUAAoJEBzwKT+lPKRYdcsQAIWqzHUbSimrUmXcYw9KH0zs fkZCQvi3Hqon1afyun6fU+NT8Ta0YkOYKW8gEiWvrogcZtMl1Q/oxOKSWZvPG8g1 8nPyDbACRL2715VUKuWgCTfABuQnHYOjFuakqAfZsXcVigxfpwWyw8eS7KfwpaDv vr/ZwqDv2ThQs63rk2rO5HW9o65nk2+XX4RBaUAw6lRZ7AfKMH5upR5Qwe231aKR DBF6GsuoWGeyONPXyGGIcrjLeizg1pOf1m0W3cTTIgI6UBNFUez+hZHGpFxbkrNE FX3onEVfrjlaxfSFmDx4ytDyOo973fhMALrasvIUSPqdKhjvIFHTYarZHRrOxex1 /L+YWnth7xAWTHPz+SzM7YWzRTDfWeOMq9PCx8wdoV88BJ35tQerxowdvbo+fPJN S+Y+zw2iZwlyN8bVfwVpG81my8SEtFgrxhyPZMTqDK8RppL1QlC+aemQHiafTwoH 78+JP1HRR/tgYM9WXsDmOhIFgZp2pjATvuklqc5gw7BWX6J9UF8LjqEAmgwj5/KI JlcMgCLH91WvjU/7p0jFnTMGHalL8Bz4L4KFp9OwA4gwkvjZQF1q1MbEGU/GVHP+ z2hJHeC4ugXk9zzO9imlUMZhC/pNGkwc/5leSMaHhwd0uZMatKh3sM4LLmoptiDP 0/kSWWI/zKK0USODk240 =21G3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
