Using python on the web

[Nick Kew]

In article <BC4B61746187C623.3FA0E7D58DF4EA7E.ECC1D97F577DEDE5 at lp.airnews.net>,
	claird at starbase.neosoft.com (Cameron Laird) writes:

> CGI has been dead for at least five years.

:-)

> I recognize no one here is disputing the proposition.  It's
> just struck me recently how pervasive the propaganda on this
> score is.  CGI has an *abyssmal* popular reputation.

Several reasons.  Like the number of non-programmers who dabble with it,
and produce something horrible that gives the impression of working.

But I think the main reason is, it's the standard every bandwagon and
marketing department has to knock.  M$ of course have worked hard to
undermine it, with severely broken implementations and "alternatives".
The JAVA folks push servlets.  And nobody in the open source community
has made any serious effort to stand up for it: indeed, rather the
opposite - with things like mod_perl stressing that it is Not CGI[1].

I have to confess to some measure of guilt.  I started work on an 
Apache module to implement non-forking CGI, eliminating the so-called
CGI overhead.  In test conditions it benchmarked very nicely against
standard CGI, static HTML pages, and mod_perl, but I never completed
it to an operational standard.  Well, maybe I'll resurrect it as a
getting-to-know-apache-2.0 exercise.

[1] Actually mod_perl _is_ CGI, in that it meets the CGI spec.  Though
of course it does a whole lot more too.

-- 
Nick Kew