Mod Layout 3.0 Escapes Beta

Brian Aker (AKA Krow) sends word that the mod_layout Apache mod has arrived after a long beta period at version 3.0. From the project's page: "By allowing you to cache static components and build sites in pieces, it gives you the tools for creating large custom portal sites. If you are looking for more information you can look at its faq."

Comments

Re:Interesting

[gengee]

If you're running a website that get's 500,000 page-views per day, that's a lot of Perl processing just to put a header/footer on every page. Mod-layout provides caching, which I can imagine may take quite a bit of load off of a large website.
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Re:Why I don't use apps like these

[gengee]

I was thinking the same thing, 'till I followed a link to the documentation. It has quite a bit more info about the project.
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Why not use a preprocessor?

[Erasmus Darwin]

From what little information there is, I don't see how this is significantly different from using a preprocessor to add static elements to your webpages. The one that I'm mildly familiar with is the Chakotay preprocessor (chpp). It seems preprocessing the pages would be more computationally efficient (do it once rather than every time you serve a page). (As a side note, does anyone have a favorite preprocessor? I never really got into chpp and don't know how it compares to some of the other ones out there.)

Personally, I can think of two reasons for mod_layout, though neither one is especially compelling:

• Completeness - There's no major "cost" to having mod_layout available. If someone doesn't use it, they don't incur any extra overhead. If they do use it, then it's solving a need.
• CGI stuff - I'm not sure, but it appears that mod_layout might work on things other than straight .html files. Since those can't be preprocessed, mod_layout would be the way to go (unless you wanted to manually add the static elements to each CGI, which is feasible in some cases, but can sometimes be a pain in the ass).

Overall, I personally don't like the Slashdot blurbs that link to a less-than-informative release message that was probably kicked out by a programmer who'd just spent the last N hours killing bugs and is in a hurry to get things up and available. I don't blame the programmer (who's doing a public service, usually for free), and I don't blame Slashdot (their role is mostly as an index rather than a direct content producer), but I still wish there was something a little more concrete, short of wading through the documentation of the actual module.

Ok... but...

[kstumpf]

What I'm trying to figure out is why I would run this module instead of just using mod_include for straight markup, or include() or virtual() in PHP docs. And in the latter case, you can use PHP cache and save some disk hits. This is what I've done for years... it works great and requires no httpd.conf modification.

Personally, I strip my Apache config down to the bare essential modules I need. This seems neat, but covers ground already tread upon long ago. Am I missing something?