Re: alternative httpd: was re: sysinstall 2

[Jeremy Messenger <mezz7@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 04 Sep 2003 00:26:31 -0400, cmulcahy wrote:

> 
> On python webservers ...
> Zope is probably waaaay to much. 
> 
>  how about medusa + quixote ? 

I think, DragonFly should stick to Apache. Apache can do near everything
and already have near everything needs too. It's a common tool. :-)

Cheers,
Mezz

> medusa  ( http://www.amk.ca/python/code/medusa.html : 107K tarball )
>         ( historic  http://nightmare.com/medusa , good async links )
> quixote  ( http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote : 190K tarball ) 
> 
> adds 2 extra directories to $PYTHON_HOME/site-packages/ 
> 
> Code is small and easily modified/maintainable 
> 
> medusa is written by Sam Rushing, who authored the asynchronous socket 
> libraries in the standard python distribution. ( the DNA is evident )
> It forms the basis of the "web-server" component of the vastly more 
> complicated Zope package. ( I assume zope's medusa components may well have 
> diverged from the standalone medusa by now, but I haven't checked. )
> The Async stuff is very fast & scalable and simple once you get the hang of 
> it. All work is performed in non-blocking tasklets scheduled from a 
> select/poll loop in one process.  No forks, no threads.  You could implement 
> the main loop in C if you are really crazy about performance; even hook into 
> kqueue instead of select/poll as the twistedmatrix guys have done in their 
> framework ( in a freebsd-specific reactor. )
> Small footprint, easily comprehended, very good performance.
> A single process can have multiple protocol handlers including 
> http,ftp,(rudimentary) chat, xmlrpc, dns resolver and ( my favorite ) a 
> "monitor" server that allows one to telnet in and get an interactive python 
> session inside the namespace of the running server.
> It is not heavily developed, but it is small & solid.  A.M. Kuchling has 
> taken over maintainence from Rushing, and has just released a new revision 
> (9/03) 
> 
> quixote is a templating framework that is typically run as a standalone 
> process that communicates with apache via FastCGI or SCGI, but it can also 
> run within python webservers like medusa or twisted.  It is similar to Zope 
> in that urls are not necessarily paths to literal files, but rather method 
> calls on remote objects ( but it is far more light-weight than Zope, and 
> without web-gui-centered administration )
>   ie. ( if i remember correctly )
>    http://example.com/foo/bar/bobo
>    becomes foo.bar.bobo("http-request-object")
>    and the result of this method call is returned to the client.
> It has also has PTL ("python templating language") for creating html.
> Its not quite "Code inside of HTML" easy like PHP or ASP, but I'm not sure 
> thats a bad thing. 
> 
> On the back end you can do anything you can do with python. 
> 
> Small footprint on disk, during, & after install.
> Quick Development & extensible.
> Disapears amongst all those python libraries after install.  ;) 
> 
> Just a late night musing. 
> 
> mulc 
> 
> 
> Garance A Drosihn writes: 
> 
>> At 8:35 PM -0400 9/3/03, Richard Coleman wrote:
>>>  If apache was to be replaced, I would suggest finding a very
>>>  basic, pure Python web server.  Something that is very easy
>>>  to understand and modify.  I'm sure many people here could
>>>  write one if necessary. Although a production web server is a
>>>  big project, a simple web server is actually pretty easy.  It
>>>  probably wouldn't take more than 300 lines of Python (probably
>>>  much less).
>> 
>> I suspect this project's resources would be better spent using
>> an already-existing web server.  I have no suggestion of whether
>> that should be apache or zope or thttpd (if we want something
>> really small), but I don't think we bring any special ideas to
>> the writing of a new web server.  Even if that takes only 300
>> lines, I'd rather see those 300 lines spent on a "really Fly
>> installer" than a hum-drum web server. 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
>> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx

-- 
bsdforums.org 's moderator, mezz.