Yahoo recently introduced a new service to their Yahoo! Web Hosting. It’s the popular blogging package, Movable Type. One of the features listed for Movable Types is:

Speed — Use of FastCGI makes the Movable Type experience on Yahoo! Web hosting services the fastest on the web

With the speed of development of PHP, ASP, and other server side technology, it was interesting to see a company, the likes of Yahoo!, using FastCGI. Maybe this will spark other companies and developers to use FastCGI.

Popularity: 3%

Share This

I believe that I now need to rethink the Ajax sequence on the project I am working on for work. As it stands, I had to do some interesting tinkering to make things work and emulate the console side properly. A normal sequence of GETs and POSTs would have been sufficient, except I needed something to handle server pushes. In the console application, there are some instances like popup boxes. Eg. After the client sends a request to the server, the server sends back a simple popup box, sorting. After it is done sorting, the server sends back the information to the browser. And this is the problem. Normally, Ajax does not handle this. This is where I had to implement a modified polling technique.

Basically, the client makes constant requests to the server. Yes, yes, I know that this is very inefficient, but this is a rough draft. Well, rough working draft. The server sends back a NULL flag, which the browser reads and ignores, or it sends back the requested data. This works, but is very inefficient. Normally, server initiated Ajax routines use a polling technique. This involves the client basically pinging the server on regular intervals to request data. I’m doing the same thing but without the time delay.

Share This

After days of configuring and reconfiguring, I have finally gotten the sequence down for a Fast CGI installation. Please note, these instructions are specifically for a fresh install of Fedora Core 4. This is what I’ve been working with, for distribution purposes. You may generalize the instructions where applicable of course. And as always, proceed at you own risk. Here we go (Italics indicate my personal settings):

1. Run the following command at the prompt:
   yum -y install httpd-devel
   You may also download the RPM, or if you’re really adventurous, build it from the source. This installs the httpd-devel package, which is needed for this installation. Most systems may already have this installed, but a fresh default install of Fedora Core 4 does not.
2. Download the “mod_fastcgi” package from FastCGI.com and unzip it to some directory of your choice.
3. Perform the following commands:
   cd mod_fastcgi...
cp Makefile.AP2 Makefile
make top_dir=/etc/httpd
make top_dir=/etc/httpd install
chown -R apache /etc/httpd

   The FastCGI Apache module has now been built.

4. Add following lines to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:
   LoadModule fastcgi_module modules/mod_fastcgi.so
Alias /fcgi-bin/ /var/www/fcgi-bin/
<directory /var/www/fcgi-bin/>
SetHandler fastcgi-script
Options +ExecCGI
</directory>
FastCgiConfig …. (if needed)


Share This

Here’s a little intro what I’ve been working on at my Job for the past couple months.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML for web development. Basically you use a some JavaScript to get down below the browser level and control HTTP “GET”s and “POST”s and stuff like that. It’s used by stuff like Google Maps and Google Suggest and GMail. What it enables is basically background activity without the user’s knowledge. This means that you don’t have to do anything really for things to happen. No need for clicks or form submissions and most importantly, no need to reload the entire page when processing data. You can read more about it here.

Now how does this tie in with my job? For the past couple months I’ve been working at a company which runs a legacy program written in ANSI C. The task I’ve been assigned is to enable web access to this program from a normal web browser. On the server end we’re running FASTCGI. This enables a process (the program) to be constantly running while being accessed from the web. Normal CGI programs and PHP scripts are run only one time and then die. FASTCGI avoids that problem.

Share This