[Catalyst] FastCGI is Weak Sauce

[Perrin Harkins]

On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 09:29 +0200, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
>     The Web Is a Pipe
>     http://duncandavidson.com/essay/2006/06/webaspipe
> 
> I’m not as sure about the practical points. In particular, I
> have no idea what Mongrel really does, although I heard about it
> before and wondered if it’s something the CPAN needs and could
> steal. I’m also unsure about how the existence and deployment of
> mod_perl affects these issues.

If I'm reading it correctly, he's upset that the protocol between web
servers and FastCGI isn't HTTP.  He doesn't make a very good case for
why, but that seems to be the gist.  He wants to run Rails directly in a
web server instead.  His solution is to write an HTTP server in Ruby to
stick onto the front of Rails (that's what Mongrel is), which also
doesn't make much sense, given how hard it is to write a truly bug-free
HTTP server.  (Probably a lot harder than it was to write Rails.)

Silly complaint or not, people running mod_perl already have this
covered, since the normal mode of deployment is to run a static web
server and proxy via HTTP over to a mod_perl server for all dynamic
stuff, i.e. exactly what he's trying to build for Ruby.

- Perrin