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Web Programming by printf()
An anonymous reader writes "Art & Logic has posted an article titled 'Why CGI is Evil'. CGI might be an obvious way to create a simple web application, but this article provides some excellent high-level reasons why CGI rarely makes long-term sense. A nice review especially for new web programmers."
As you can see, I'm not a web programmer and the article actually made things more unclear for me. Did I misunderstood something? Can someone clarify things up for me, please?
Agreed, totally bunk. If you're actually doing what they suggest, cutting and pasting blocks of someone else's html into your code and/or mixing static pages and code sections, then yeah, you might be inefficient. However, most intelligent CGI programmers will write functions/methods to output the majority of the content, and then supply the data to those functions. If you write your presentation code in this manner, you can put it in a library and call that function again and again from different programs to get a consistent look and feel.
Of course, as the previous poster implies, there are a lot of pre-written libraries out there as well, and not only in C but in Perl, Python, Ruby, and every other langauge that someone has used for building CGI programs. Templating is fine for those who really need to separate the presentation from the business logic, but if you're doing both parts it is far easier to maintain one pure CGI code base that handles the presentation through well thought out functions.
I've been using C-based CGIs for years - once I started doing it and got used to coding everything in C, and developing my own libraries and what-not, it was very difficult to change.
Seems to me the overhead's pretty low compared to the competition. People argue for things like JSP as more efficient and cleaner than CGI, but I've never seen a JSP web site that's not dog slow.
When I started reading that opening a database connection had enormous overhead, I got worried that I was really doing something dumb. So I wrote a program to open and close a mySQL database 1000 times and it took a total of 2 seconds. That's 0.002 seconds per open/close combination.
Then I stopped worrying and went back to work. I'd rather be right in practice and wrong in theory than vice versa.
D
I know nothing about programming embedded systems, but surely you could devise and use a very basic/simple templating system in embedded devices. Could anyone out there with experience in programming embedded devices fill me in?
True, there is a penalty to interpreted code, but a lot of this penalty can be mitigated (in PHP at least). The folks at Zend offer their PHP accelerator, and I use the ion cube (free as in beer) on my puny home server.
Both of these compile the scripts, and parse, and validate _once_ (per reboot). For every subsequent call to the script, the server just runs the cached copy of the compiled code. So, you get all of the benefits of the scripted language, i.e. speed of coding, and fewer of the downsides.