Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Today's scriptingNews Outline
Author: Eric Kidd Posted: 12/9/1999; 8:15:32 AM Topic: Today's scriptingNews Outline Msg #: 13508 (In response to 13507) Prev/Next: 13507 / 13509
(My current e-mail address is eric.kidd@pobox.com.)Linux.Com survey on scripting languages.
According to one of the comments, PHP now has a standard database API. Kudos to the PHP developers--all those inconsistent database interfaces in earlier releases made PHP unnecessarily cumbersome. It's still easier to do database work in Zope, but at least PHP is on the right planet.
I've also been playing with another server-side scripting system recently: Apache and mod_perl. It turns out that Apache is highly modular and provides many extension hooks. Using mod_perl, I can access these hooks from Perl scripts. (As usual, there's an O'Reilly book: Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C.)
Some benefits: Apache is really flexible. I can build smart proxy servers, database interfaces, content generators and custom authentication methods. If I'm careful, the resulting code will run under Linux/Unix and Windows NT. Some drawbacks: This only works if you control the Apache server in question, and you need to have mod_perl installed.
At least one popular site uses Apache, mod_perl and MySQL to build a complicated content app: Slashdot.org. So this combination can clearly scale.
Dave would argue, though, that these back-end systems are becoming less interesting. There's only a certain number of people who want to hack around in the guts of their servers, and a lot more who simply want to develop content.
Cheers,
Eric
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:41 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.