Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sun, 1 Dec 2024 11:08:46 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Of course you can write CGI in any language if you like ...

CGI has terrible performance, and is not recommended for production use.
There is still FastCGI, but that also seems to be obsolescent -- certainly
it was never updated to handle WebSocket connections.

AFAIK Apache can be configured to use any language for 'active pages' .
PHP is however the default.

There is no “PHP default” in Apache. Apache comes with a standard set of
loadable modules for various purposes, and there are third-party ones for
PHP and Python (mod_php, mod_python) and no doubt other languages, none of
which are part of Apache itself. But running as a module within Apache has
limitations: this is another reason† why it’s hard for PHP to support
WebSockets.

A better way to run code in a language of your choice is to have your app
implement its own mini web server, and have Apache or Nginx provide access
to that via a server-side proxy (commonly misnamed a “reverse proxy”).
This way, your code has total control over its own process(es) and
privileges and network access and everything. This also allows for
WebSocket connections.

†besides bad language design