Re: [Caml-list] Web Development with OCaml

[Samuel Heriard Dubreuil <heriard@clipper.ens.fr>]

> > Is there any interest in a mod_ocaml or a fast-cgi module for OCaml?
> > I haven't a clue on how to develop either but could possibly learn. :)
> > After learning OCaml (at least some) first.
> 
> If I understand correctly what you mean by mod_ocaml (packaging
> OCaml runtime environment in a Apache module, in order to avoid to
> load it for every request), Samuel Heriard (in Cc)
> started such a project; I don't know how the progress status.

That's right, I started to write a mod_caml (a la mod_perl). I've not been
working on it since six months, but it does work under apache 1.3 (at
least "Hello world !").
I didn't worry too much about performance issues because I wrote it in
one afternoon mainly to learn the apache api. But I'd like to restart working
on it.
The principle was to associate the caml handler to .cmo files, dynamically
load  $DocumentRoot/bar.cmo on a request to http://foo.com/bar.cmo, let the cmo
do the job, and then unload it. The goal was to create something like jsp.
I know it's pretty inefficient, but with a cache system, you would not
have to load/unload a .cmo for each request.


> The GC should'nt be a big problem: between two requests, the runtime
> environment can completely flush the heap (excepted for the
> connection/persistency manager). But I may miss some important issues.

The connection manager is an orthogonal problem. A connection may use
several instances of the runtime (several apache process) so I think it
has nothing to deal with the garbage collector (one can use files, shared
memory or db to store the connection informations).

So if you're interested in working an a mod_ocaml, let me know, I'll send
you the code (actually not more than a hundred lines of caml/C if I
remember).

--
Samuel
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