Netcgi
Dynamic web applications are made of scripts/programs whose
output is sent to the user. These scripts need a connection
with the web server in order to get the parameters and return
the data.
Netcgi
is a mature implementation of the following connectors:
- CGI/1.1: The Common
Gateway Interface is a very simple connector but
suffers from performance problems as the script is
started from scratch for each request. That also means
that the script cannot cache database connections which
are expensive to set up. CGI is a good choice however
to test your scripts or for web sites that only need to
handle a few requests a second (it is supported by all
webservers).
- FastCGI: FCGI scripts
can be either started by the web server or started "by
hand" possibly on a machine different from the web
server. In both cases, the script is always running
(which allows caching), the web server connecting to it
for each request.
- AJP 1.3: AJP is very
similar to FCGI except that the scripts (often
called servlets in this context in the Java
world) are usually started independently of the web
server.
- Apache API: This
connector is a binding to the Apache API which works
with Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.* (although there are some
issues
with the latter). This is a port from
mod_caml,
hence his name. This connector is very fast. However, your
scripts can only be compiled into bytecode (because they are
linked into the webserver at runtime with Dynlink)
and of course it only works with Apache.
Netstring
Netpop
Netclient
