Re: What would _you_ like in a Lua CMS?

[David Given <dg@...>]

Petite Abeille wrote:
[...]
> Hmmm... so... HTTP -> Apache -> (Fast?)GCI -> WSAPI -> stuff... what 
> about HTTP -> stuff instead? 

You mean, do an HTTP mini-server in the CMS app itself?

There are four major problems with this approach:

- doesn't play nicely with a third-party web server; you either end up 
having to run two outward-facing servers on a single box, or else have 
your main web server proxy to the CMS server, which is usually a pain;

- HTTP ain't as simple as at looks, particularly when dealing with stuff 
like multipart, transfer encoding, negotiating compression and so on; 
targeting something like WSAPI makes all these problems go away, as the 
main web server does it for you;

- having two HTTP servers means that you've double the chances of 
exposing a security flaw to the outside world; WSAPI nicely isolates you 
from the web server proper, making it very easy to run your client code 
at reduced privileges;

- Javascript security policies mean that it's a pain in the arse to 
split a complex site between two web servers; this means that it can 
become rather hard to, for example, server static content from lighttpd 
and dynamic content from your CMS server; life becomes much easier when 
you can serve everything from a single server.

I have actually in the past implemented a web app using my own mini HTTP 
server. This was before I knew about Lua, so I actually did it in 
LambdaMOO code. It *worked*, but if I'd known in advance what a pain it 
would be, I wouldn't have done it like that...

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