[plt-scheme] Industrial servlets and Apache

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003, Jon Buffington wrote:

> Another option is FastCGI. The protocol is mature and already has 
> implementations available for Common Lisp to use as a starting point. 
> Details can be found at http://www.fastcgi.com/.

Thanks for jogging my memory.  Oleg Kiselyov and Mario Latendresse
developed a C FastCGI client and a mini-protocol for communicating
between it and an arbitrary third process.  I hacked on this for quite
some time and got it working quite well Guile.  I can't believe this
slipped my mind.

The two possible problems with this approach that I know of are first,
in its current state it doesn't allow multiplexing across multiple
servlet engines (however it is quite good about restarting a local
client process when necessary, and it can talk to a client over a TCP
connection), and second, there may be something squirrely about the
FastCGI license.  Debian classifies mod_fcgi as non-free.  When I
looked last, Debian had an old mod_fcgi, and the license has grown
more liberal since then.  I read both versions of the license and
didn't see a problem with either one.

So yes, this might be the way to go.  Anyone interested in seeing this
code please let me know.  I implemented the client protocol in Guile,
and it would probably be easy to adapt it to mzscheme.