[Web-SIG] Defining a standard interface for common web tasks

[Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy]

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Thijs van der Vossen wrote:

> On Friday 24 October 2003 09:58, David Fraser wrote:
> > Thijs van der Vossen wrote:
> > >Mod_python is probably _not_ a good starting point for a generic web
> > > server API because it's purpose is to directly expose the Apache API. It
> > > makes no sense to model a generic interface on a mostly direct mapping to
> > > the internals of _one_ specific server.
> >
> > I'm not saying that the interface should be modelled on mod_python.
>
> Ok. That's clear then.

I don't know how useful the mod_python interface would be since, as Thijs
pointed out, it exposes the Apache API, with only a slight effort to make
it user-friendly. All of the "cool" parts of mod_python (publisher, psp)
exist as a layer on top of the core API.

However it would be nice if whatever API we come up with, it would be
*implementable* within mod_python.

Of particular concern would the multi-process nature of httpd, which
implies that one cannot simply assume that the memory space is global to
all requests and there needs to be an inter-process communication/locking
mechanism if state is to be maintained on the server side (easier said
than done).

As a sidenote, a multi-process server is a feature, not a limitation,
because it works around the Python GIL bottleneck, allowing you to take
advantage of multiprocessor machines, which is a very important
consideration on the high-end applications.

Grisha