Youthful transgressions

Youthful transgressions

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Not that this has anything to do with anything (like anything ever
has), but since I, like, have My Own Web Server, I've been rooting
about to see what stuff I could put on it.

And then I remembered that I was probably among the first people who
did "active contents" on the Web.

I don't really know when I wrote it, but I guess it had to be in
mid-93, if the timestamps on these files are correct.  (When did
Mosaic appear?  92?)

The thing I wrote was a database that let people, er, search and enter 
stuff.  (Related to the 4AD record company.)  I remember pondering
long and hard about how to preserve state in a stateless protocol anb
cursing the designers of HTTP.  And HTML.  In case they happened to be 
different people.

I wrote it for the Plexus web server, which is written in Perl.  Since 
this was before the days of CGI, it basically doesn't work anywhere
but under Plexus, so I fetched the latest version of that (from mid-94 
:-) and saw if the thing still worked.  After fiddling some with the
C++ and Perl (since the languages have moved on) -- it did.  So I'm
putting it out there again.

Appearing on Quimby tomorrow -- a database monstrosity written in C++
and Perl!  :-)

It will probably be <URL:http://quimby.gnus.org:8001/eyesore?>, I
guess, but there's nothing there now.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: Youthful transgressions

[Doug Bagley]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> I wrote it for the Plexus web server, which is written in Perl.  Since 
> this was before the days of CGI, it basically doesn't work anywhere
> but under Plexus, so I fetched the latest version of that (from mid-94 
> :-) and saw if the thing still worked.  After fiddling some with the
> C++ and Perl (since the languages have moved on) -- it did.  So I'm
> putting it out there again.

Ha Ha!  Talk about youthful transgressions ... okay, sorry if this
story only amuses me, but it's kind of apropos on a couple levels.

Anyway, I'd looked at plexus for use here at dejanews 3 years ago, and
decided to write my own because I only needed very select functionality.
A couple months later I was having dinner with some friends; a mutual
friend had decided to go work for Micro$oft, and we were sending him off
with a heavy dinner of german sausages and a good round of ridicule.
One of the guys at the table was "Tony" a guy I knew when we were both
contract programmers at IBM here in Austin.  I mentioned my web server,
and he said "Oh another web server written in perl", then he mentioned
plexus and I told him I had looked at it, but "it was too slow" :-)

Yup, it was Tony *Sanders* (as I later found out), and I was casting
aspersions on his plexus!  D'oh!

Anyway, we now use Apache/mod_perl (http://perl.apache.org/), which I
would recommend to anyone who likes to get their hands dirty in the
guts inside of the web server.  It does end up eating up lots of
memory, but the functionality is outstanding, and there are lots of
add-on modules to do database access and session management and you
can add in whatever else you like.

Cheers,
Doug