CGI problems in Personal Web Server

[Alex Martelli]

"Bertilo Wennergren" <bertilow at hem.passagen.se> wrote in message
news:8pfjve$d10rg$1 at ID-4825.news.cis.dfn.de...
    [snip]
> Regretfully I wouldn't be able to do any ASP work on Apache. I do
> a lot of ASP as well. It would be really nice to be able to develop
> CGI in Perl, CGI in Python, ASP in VBScript, ASP in JavaScript, and
> ASP in PerlScript - all in the same server. Maybe I could add PHP
> as well. (I don't know about Java servlets...)

Don't forget ASP in Python as well:-).

> > Apache gives everybody "full power" on any platform.
> > http://apache.org/docs/windows.html
>
> Does "full power" include ASP?

It includes stuff semantically quite close to ASP, but, I think,
not a complete emulation of ASP; particularly because I see
no way to emulate it on *any* platform -- it strictly depends
on having a way for ANY scripting language (including those
not yet designed at the time the ASP server was written:-) to
offer its functionality "polymorphically" with any other such
language.  On Win32, the Active Scripting set of interfaces
and protocol offers just such a way -- which is the reason
ASP (and other applications) can host any language at all as
long as the language implements Active Scripting properly,
and well-designed servers can host multiple scripting languages
side by side (i.e. you can have a single Active Scripting Page
that has some Python, some Haskell, AND some VB too...:-).

On other platforms, there are, I think no such standards for
language interoperability; just one of the ways in which other
platforms lag behind Win32 in terms of *componentization*
infrastructures.  Maybe one could fake it with Corba (Corba 3,
as I understand it, at long last has componentization aspects,
including its own novel scripting language; but, I don't know
about any implementations), or maybe with a JVM (a JServer
setup should be able to serve classes written in any language
able to generate good complete JVM bytecode).


Alex