What I think you're thinking of sounds a lot like mod_perl.

Get mod_perl here as Zaxo says it is what you are looking for, ready to go. Seeing you mention slashdot (who get slashdotted all the time ;-) you may be interested to know they use mod_perl. While you are at it I recommend you to have a look at Apache::DynaGzip which will gzip your content on the fly (static or dymanic) thus cutting your bandwidth use radically as well as making the end user experience better. Most big sites use some form of gzip compression. In case you don't know browsers can decompress gzip streams so (provided they accept it) you send the content gzipped and they decompress it locally. It is a real win-win.

cheers

tachyon

Well, I also remembered mod_perl, and well, I just forgot to mention it in the OP.

However, from what little I did manage to gather from the documentation, it appeared to be a method of internal server scripting or a method to write server modules without going into C.

How does Apache know that some scripts are Perl, and others are, I dunno, python, bash, tcsh, or just about anything else somebody would be silly enough to mix in with Perl? Does it check the shebang?

I guess the main thing would be that I did not wish to rely on a single piece of software to have this work with. Though that is curable by a simple switcher script (if feature is available, use it, if not, don't use it)

Also, other than ye' ol' RTFM, what articles, places on the web, what have you, are there to learn about mod_perl? As maybe shown above, previous attempts left me... well not that decently knowledgable

.Net is only effect inasmuch as you can run the languages you want to under the CLR (Common Language Runtime). There are several languages to choose from (including a few environments that support Perl). You might want to have a look at the Mono project: http://www.go-mono.com.

I looked in the languages section, and did not see Perl as a supported language. Though, from what little I've gathered, that appears to be what I want to work on.

Though, I would need to get a feel for it... are there any places, other than straight RTFM, that I could possibly play with languages that are already there? Just to get a feel?

There isn't any Perl support within the Mono project per-se. However, there's a dotPerl effort that someone mentioned on one of the mono mailing lists a week or two back, and there is also a Visual Studio.NET module/plug-in of some sort that ActiveState makes. Since these would ultimately produce .Net assemblies, you could then use them under a Mono system. However, both tools (as far as I know) would have to be run under Windows environments that support Visual Studio-level development (i.e. W2K or newer, excluding WinME).

--rjray

There's an existing standard and supporting libraries for this, in the form of FastCGI. If your CMS can support the FastCGI protocol, than you can talk to existing applications written to use FastCGI in Perl and many other languages.

Hmm... I've seen FastCGI in various software lists, but was given nothing as to its nature. I am also spotting a nice consistancy in my posts in this thread.

That is lack of eduction, or lack of advertisiment. About the only thing I see close to this in various linux magazines is maybe a quick article comprising mostly of links to online places to something that seems... well... I have a lot of reading to do, for things I found on my own.

I just need a starting place for FastCGI. (Which Perldoc will be checked well enough)

Perhaps Open Source and Free Software movements need to up their advertisements?

Too little known, so much to read up on.

It is not so much a server in Perl that I want to create, it is more of a server to read Perl, and various other languages too. Just so in the features list (AKA Bugs AKA Lies), I can mention something about scalability and expandability and various other Buzzwords.

The software itself, as a goal, should require that as little be install on the target platform as possible. Well as little outside the range of software behind this CMS.

Unless I failed to penetrate your post, you do not need any other languages. The point of your project seems to be a public application or messaging server with a content management backend, all of which can be built on great perl modules, see the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network at cpan.org and turn yourself loose on all the resources that are available there. I also recommend the CGI::Application module which may help you keep things organized..

Mod_perl is basically a perl interpreter bound into Apache, which makes each child process bigger but the total is much better performance since you do not load interpreters all the time. You can actually run perl CGI programs on it too though. Mod_perl programming requires that you program cleanly, since globals can get carried across processes. However I built a search server that calls a C++ based program (htdig) and benefits a lot (security, prototyping, pluggability, management console, massaging output) from the mod_perl part and consistently provides results in tenths of a second. Also if you program with "use strict" you can probably convert your CGI to MP immediately when you move to an ISP that provides MP.

The rest of what you are talking about is probably Parrot which is still being developed, which you can learn about for yourself online. But you do not need Parrot (or .Net for that matter) for your CMS. If you do need to execute say Java or something else you can undoubtedly call it from your mod_perl program, but I do not have experience in embedding say inline Java (these perl modules exist) in such an environment.

You may wish to study the apache manuals since this will explain how you specify handlers in the httpd.conf file to direct files with certain suffixes, or in certain folders, to be run with a given handler. It also tells how to control access by IP if that is what you want, though there are a bunch of apache/perl modules that can do authorization against databases and so on. I used mysqlauth on apache 2 (not there are different versions out there) with success. I recommend you start small and once you get something working add on to it.

As for Perl-based servers this is another possibility, but it is not clear if it will be as bulletproof or more so than apache. Why not experiment with a couple of different ways first.

I'd like to thank you for your nice description on mod_perl. I probably will not be attempting the whole perl server now that I know what is going on with mod_perl.

Though, just note, as the confusing is still there, it was not a web server I was thinking about making. If anything the default was to only run over 127.0.0.1 (or ::1), and allow for other IP addresses to be added. The client would send a perl script to be ran under a certain username:password sort of pair. The script would be ran, and STDOUT&STDERR would be returned to the client.

Oh, and as for the weirdest post... I was mostly trying to get thoughts and feelings down--think of it like a core dump from my mind.

Hi, Thanks for your reply. That's cool, I hope it was of some help. I'm not sure how the stderr etc. get returned, I was saying >2&1 or whatever you write in bash to redirect (merge) stderr to stdout, and write to a file, but I did do massaging of web page outputed by c++ program so that much is certainly doable. I forget how I did it, you use backticks or also there is a module to do it too I believe, see the long mod_perl manual on the big mod_perl developers site. Good luck!