From: http://jmtd.livejournal.com/ Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:19:51 +0000 (-0500) Subject: spew stream-of-conciousness nonsense re web services, fastcgi etc. X-Git-Tag: 3.20091202~25 X-Git-Url: http://git.vanrenterghem.biz/git.ikiwiki.info.git/commitdiff_plain/5e513aa867fe22e021a5d02bb3fba57302a30ea8 spew stream-of-conciousness nonsense re web services, fastcgi etc. --- diff --git a/doc/forum/web_service_API__44___fastcgi_support.mdwn b/doc/forum/web_service_API__44___fastcgi_support.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 000000000..480014c00 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/forum/web_service_API__44___fastcgi_support.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This is a half-baked thought of mine so I thought I would post it in forum for discussion. + +There are some things that ikiwiki.cgi is asked to do which do not involve changing the repository: these include form generation, handling logins, the "goto" from [[recentchanges]], edit previews, etc. + +For one thing I am working on slowly ([[todo/interactive todo lists]]), I've hit a situation where I am likely to need to implement doing markup evaluation for a subset of a page. The problem I face is, if a user edits content in the browser, markup, ikiwiki directives etc. need to be expanded. I could possibly do this with a round-trip through edit preview, but that would be for the whole content of a page, and I hit the problem with editing a list item. + +Anyway - I've realised that a big part of the interactive todo lists stuff is trying to handle round trips to ikiwiki.cgi through javascript. A web services API would make handling the various conditions of this easier (e.g. need to login, login failed, etc.). I'm not sure what else might benefit from a web services API and I have no real experience of either using or writing them so I don't know what pros/cons there are for REST vs SOAP etc. + +Second, and in a way related, I've been mooting hacking fastcgi support into ikiwiki. Essentially one ikiwiki.cgi process would persist and serve CGI-ish requests on stdin/stdout. The initial content-scanning and dependency generation would happen once and not need to be repeated for future requests. Although, all state-changing operations would need to be careful to ensure the in-memory models were accurate. Also, I don't know how suited the data structures would be for persistence, since the current model is build em up, throw em away, they might not be space-efficient enough for persistence. + +If I did attempt this, I would want to avoid restructuring things in a way which would impair ikiwiki's core philosophy of being a static compiler. -- [[Jon]]