FastCGI (or CGI) app partitioning
Skip Montanaro (skip@automatrix.com)
Sat, 12 Oct 1996 13:00:06 -0400 (EDT)
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 13:00:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Skip Montanaro <skip@automatrix.com>
Message-Id: <199610121700.NAA15088@dolphin.automatrix.com>
To: "J. Merrill" <jvm@cais.cais.com>
Subject: FastCGI (or CGI) app partitioning
In-Reply-To: <2.2.16.19961008154008.315762c0@cais.com>
The application for which I'm trying to build a web front-end is very
processor- and memory-intensive, so I don't want to run it on the customer's
main WWW server. I'd prefer not to set up an entire WWW server (on another
machine) and have it use some of the machine resources that my app would be
glad to have. So I want to have the routine that runs on the main WWW
server be a very lightweight one which sends info across to another machine
which will host my app -- and the stuff that the FastCGI mechanism sends to
a FastCGI routine that's running on the WWW server is exactly what I'd need
to send over.
In some of the FastCGI docs there's mention of this kind of thing being
possible, but I haven't seen any examples. Has anyone else? Has anyone
built something like this?
I'm not sure what capabilities FastCGI has for this sort of thing, but it's
precisely the thing that the Inter-Language Unification system (ILU) from
Xerox PARC excels at. ILU is an RPC mechanism that runs over multiple
transports (including HTTP and same-address-space), has bindings for several
different languages and runs on Windows (all common varieties) and Unix
(again, most commonly used systems are supported). I'm aware of support for
C, C++ and Python. Support for Java and Common Lisp is in the works I
believe. Those folks interested might want to check out the ILU web page
at:
ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html
Digital Creations (http://www.digicool.com/) has created ILU modules for
both the Apache and Netscape servers. Check out:
http://www.digicool.com/releases/ilurequester/
Skip Montanaro | Musi-Cal: http://concerts.calendar.com/
skip@calendar.com | Conference Calendar: http://conferences.calendar.com/
(518)372-5583 | Python: http://www.python.org/