Re: FLASH: Flash, CGI and e-commerce

[Laura Mollett]

Eric asked me to forward this information to the list in case anyone was 

interested.


Laura


----------

>

From: Eric Moore <moorelovecraft [dot] chem [dot] cmu [dot] edu>

>

To: "Laura Mollett" <lmollettmis [dot] net>

>Subject: Re: Fw: Re:FLASH: Flash, CGI and e-commerce

>Date: Thu, Jul 1, 1999, 3:40 AM

>


>> If you expect any sort of load on the site, I would not recommend

>> using CGI scripting, even if it were possible to author the site that

>> way.

>

> I would imagine it is possible.  CGI scripts are capable of basically

> anything any other server-side web-based mechanism is.

>

>> Unix has to fork off a separate process each time the script is

>> invoked, and that takes quite a toll in performance.

>

> Just as a technical nit, *any* OS needs to create a separate process

> for each instance of a CGI script.  Unix (in general) has a relatively

> low process creation overhead, and a decent-sized Linux box can handle

> serving some 50 CGI hits a second so I wouldn't rule it out offhand,

> but, yes, CGI does incur some overhead and if performance is a real

> issue, this could become a problem.

>

>> I have no experience with Generator, so I can't answer that aspect

>> of your question.

>

> There is Swift Generator (http://www.swift-tools.com/), which

> basically provides the same functionality as MacroMedia's Generator on

> unixes.

>

>> Ignoring Generator for a moment, for a commerce site, I'd suggest

>> going with either Cold Fusion or Active Server Pages. For the

>> latter, I think the best development environment today is a package

>> called Drumbeat 2000. Besides their 'regular' version, I believe

>> they have an ecommerce edition, but have no experience with it. ASP

>> is generally run with the Microsoft IIS server, but I have heard

>> that there are 3rd party add-ons that will support ASP on Unix

>> machines. I don't know if Cold Fusion is available on Unix or not.

>

> Apache (which should run on almost any UNIX platform that you'd care

> to put an ecommerce website on) has the ability to add "modules" that

> can extend it's functionality.  The two most relevant to this would be

> mod_php and mod_perl.  PHP (http://www.php.net/) is a server-side,

> cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language.  Basically does the

> same thing as ASP.  There is also an ASP-PHP converter

> (http://home.i1.net/~naken/asp2php/) available if you really want

> one. Another possibility is mod_perl (http://perl.apache.org/) which

> allows (among other things) you to run perl scripts inside the server

> (without forking off a separate process).

>

> If I were to make a reccomendation I'd suggest starting with perl CGI

> scripts, and moving to mod_perl if it was necessary.

>

>   -Eric

>

> 


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