Re: Post about a Apache/mod_perl based component/service architecture

On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, Bas A.Schulte wrote:

> Apache/mod_perl component containers
> ********************************************
>
> When thinking about how to implement all this I was tempted to look into
> doing it with some J2EE-thingy. However, there was this time-constraint
> as well as a constraint on available programmer-hands (I tricked
> management into hiring one programmer for 20 days, the rest I had to do
> by myself). Then it struck me that this game application server really
> looked like a vanilla regular mod_perl web application: receive request
> from user, process, send back reply. No html though, but Message objects
> that could be serialized/deserialized from text strings. There were of
> course some differences: the reply is not sent back inline (i.e. upon
> reception of a request via SMS, you can't "reply"; you have to create a
> whole new message and send that to the originator of the message) and
> there was this timer service: I can't make Apache/mod_perl do work
> without having it received a user-initiated request.

The problem with lack of timers and "in the future" events made me switch
a lot of my server work from mod_perl to POE. Despite your fears about
cooperative multitasking (yes it's a pain, but there are work-arounds),
it's a very nice platform to develop for, IMHO.

Also note that what you have created is pretty much a "REST" application.
See recent XML.com articles on the future of web services for details of
this design pattern. Personally I think you'd be a fool to migrate an
elegantly designed application like that to SOAP.

-- 
<!-- Matt -->
<:->Get a smart net</:->