Re: WSAPI replacement draft

[Matthew Frazier <leafstormrush@...>]

On 01/22/2011 07:28 PM, Jim Whitehead II wrote:
> I'm going to tag onto Chris's responses for many things here, but I
> want to say something about this. Your assertion that WSAPI is only
> used by Kepler servers and applications just isn't necessarily true.
> My entire production website runs as a single Lua script that uses
> WSAPI. I don't use anything of the Kepler stack other than some of the
> non-web related libraries, and WSAPI itself. I've run this server
> under Lighttpd, Apache and a few other servers simply because its an
> executable script.

Whoops. I guess that was a bit of a fail. Though when I said "Kepler 
servers" I was referring more to "Kepler connectors," like the CGI and 
FastCGI connectors they maintain in the WSAPI library. (I probably 
should have clarified that more.) About the only WSAPI connector I have 
seen not part of a Kepler library is the one with HTTP.lua (though if 
I'm wrong about that too feel free to let me know).

> That's the major advantage of WSAPI.. it already works everywhere.
> That's not to say that something 'different' isn't a good idea, but is
> it going to be much of anything other than a transformation or
> different form of what WSAPI already does? Getting a 'standard' in Lua
> is hard enough as it is it seems like it would be a bit tragic to
> abandon one that we have =).

I'll concede that the job it does is very similar to WSAPI. The main 
difference (besides the API style) is that it's not bound to a specific 
library for most of its implementation. If you look at the manual page 
for WSAPI, there are about six paragraphs and a code sample that 
actually specify the interface, and even then it's very loosely defined. 
It seems to me that it was mostly designed so that servers could have an 
interface to run the Kepler libraries, because there's very little 
specified on what's available to the application side.

> > > - What do you think about the ideas in the blog post? Do you think a new
> > > style of interface is necessary?
>
> I personally don't have all that much use for it until I see more. I
> can already take and wrap a WSAPI application with whatever data
> structure I'd like and access the data, while having the consistency
> across the stack. I do this now and it makes my life easier.

A reasonable viewpoint. I don't expect this to take over from WSAPI 
immediately, even once there are servers and libraries for it.
--
Regards, Matthew Frazier