Re: LW as a web app

>> Which required a FASTCGI responder: https://github.com/adamweaver/lw-fcgi

> How does this work?  Do you compile your lisp application to an
> executable 

Yes, like I said in the original post - DELIVER the application to an executable. 
I run the executable in a startup script on the server.

> which is then spawned by the webserver?

That's CGI not FASTCGI. CGI is a "spawn process per connection", and FASTCGI
was invented to multiplex requests over a single connection

> Or do you run it in app-server style, where you expose a socket or a tcp
> port from your running lisp to service requests from the webserver?

Yeah this one. My LW-FCGI code listens on the given port for FCGI requests.
It's a binary protocol, but it's pretty basic. Essentially it's the same as a 
HTTP/1.1 request, but rather than parsing headers from the body stream,
HTTP headers are sent in a weird sort-of-netstring-but-not-really format.

> The former is the only mode of operation that seems to be possible from
> what I see from locally installed lighttpd docs. 

that's interesting. I'm using CADDY as a frontend rather than lighthttpd, and
Caddy explicitly requires the fcgi/http transports to already be running. No
spwaning-on-demand possible.

> There are two versions
> of cl-fastcgi on github. KDr2/cl-fastcgi (also KDr2/sb-fastcgi) which
> uses ffi to a c library libfcgi.so, and there's also a sbcl-only
> ruediger/cl-fastcgi which seems to be a lisp implementation, 

Oh to be honest I didn't even look for existing lisp fastcgi implementations
before writing my own. It's rather a simple protocol - I had it running in a day. 

FCGI _is_ however rather underspecified - no RFC level of detail in the "spec", 
so there's a little bit of trial-and-error required in the implementation.

> I can't
> spot how to rig a running lisp to the webserver.

I'm with you - socket/port is the way I guess. Makes sense, the
image based nature of lisp doesn't exactly play well with the average 
web server.

I think even PHP has gone the FastCGI route - mod_php (Apache only)
seems to be deprecated in favour of FPM. But that's PHP. Yuck. 

> Would it be possible for me to run lw-fcgi from say the personal edition
> where with say lighthttp?

I would think so? There's nothing LW-PRO or LW-ENT specific in the 
codebase. It *is* a very simple protocol after all.

But you'd want to fix the request matching to suit your needs; the code
I shoved up on github is very specific to my needs :(

I only put that and a bunch of other support libs up on github because 
I was having the guilts over not contributing non-core-to-my-app code
back to the community. 

Not that I would expect anyone in the community to be particularly
interested in my not-documented-at-all-and-probably-complete-crap
code anyway :|

A

_______________________________________________
Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
[email protected]
http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html