Need advice: serving data using http/web-server to clients ( not only browsers )

[Olivier Dagenais]

I'm implementing something similar on the back-end, using a threaded FastCGI
instance, so that I can synchronize the accesses to a database.   I'm using
Gadfly as a database engine, so it's portable.

The difference is that I'm returning data that only my client will use and
maybe I should be using XML but I've come up with my own little format
because I knew how to do that quickly and I needed some security features...
<g>

It sounds like your project is further ahead than mine, although it would be
interesting to compare ideas and maybe merge efforts...???

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Olivier A. Dagenais - Software Architect and Developer
"Someone called 'Type your name here' is impersonating me on the
internet and is posting exactly the same things I am posting!"


"Thomas Weholt" <thomas at cintra.no> wrote in message
news:LwxM5.1936$mx.44638 at news1.oke.nextra.no...
> Hi,
>
> I want to serve data from a database using the HTTP-protocol and a
> web-server. The data can be in several different formats, html, xml, cvs,
> plain text or binary, compressed etc. The client is mostly browsers but a
> specific client is written in python that processes the data from the
> web-server further and gives the user the ability to manipulate it in
> several ways ( generate other views etc. ) is also in production.
>
> So I need to be able to serve html/xml to browsers and other formats too
if
> the client requests it. I've defined a request-protocol using the HTTP
> post-command and params in the body-part of the request are used to query
> the database and athenticate the user etc.
>
> Sometimes the client will upload a binary file, using the client or
browser,
> to the server too. Also using the post-command.
>
> So far I've used Medusa/Zope to extend the default web-server to fit my
> needs, but I'm having a hard time getting it stable for the most simple
> tasks and I cannot get the uploading of binary files to the server to
work.
> The performance is also not as good as Apache either. I'm a really huge
fan
> of Zope and use it for all my other web-tasks, but it seems slow. For this
> specific task I need very low response-time and I don't need much of the
> fancier stuff in Zope.
>
> My project is very simple ( the complexity lies outside the web-server
> "scope" ) ; I have a method that takes parts of the data in the
> request-header as parameter, also any uploaded files. It returns the data
to
> the browser. I need to be able to set the content-type ( text/plain,
> text/html, application/octet-stream etc.) of the response data, use
> compression ( gzip, zlib ), authenticate users and receive data from the
> browser/client. So all I need is to call my method with the required
params,
> which should be available in the header, or collected then sent to the
> method, and return data. I prefer to the user authentication in my method
> manually, not use anything in Apache etc.
>
> I need to serve different platforms and environments ( linux, windows,
> netscape, IE, lynx etc. ).
>
> My main requirements are :
> 1. simplicity ( in the web-server, only a few lines of code should be
> needed, possibly some to decode the header-data, then just a call to my
> method )
> 2. performance ( the web-server/python-solution must have as little as
> possible overhead, ie. I can suffer some code complexity to gain
> performance, but keep number req. 1 in mind )
> 3. stability ( the actual server must be able to cope with high workloads
> without failing. My implementation in Medusa/Zope crashes terribly under
> very low workloads, *but* that's probably my fault, not Medusa/Zope. Still
I
> cannot get it to work right. )
> 4. compatibility ( all normal browsers and the version 1.1 of HTTP must be
> supported, I need compression of data to the browser and uploading of
large
> binary files ( 1kb -10mb ???) )
>
> Can anybody point me in the right direction? Apache with : FastCGI,
> mod_snake, mod_python, pros and cons of different solutions, or just ideas
> about my project, how I could do things better.
>
> Thanks,
> Thomas Weholt
>
>