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Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

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Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pretty easily change from Cloudflare to any other Jamstack host. Cgi just isn't necessary anymore and would be more baggage than anything at this point. The old web stacks are just time sinks. It's so much nicer to be able to git push... And that's it. Done.

Forgive my digression but for years I’ve seen small efforts here and there to elevate the concept of a “stack” and promote it as the level abstraction to use when discussing web apps and the like. What’s up with that? Grab any 3 commonly used pieces of technology whose names can be used to form a fun initialism, append stack to the end, and soon there will be experts speaking at conferences dedicated to it. JamStack…

Jamstack in particular is not really an example of that; it is more of a kind of architecture than a specific stack, in that it doesn't prescribe the use of specific software. An architecture where all the HTML/CSS/JS is precompiled statically for maximum cacheability, and server-side dynamic behavior happens exclusively within AJAX calls that return structured data, is a natural kind, and useful to have a term for so that we can compare and contrast it to other ways of building web apps.

More broadly, other acronym stacks are a thing because complementary technologies cluster together, especially in relatively immature ecosystems. E.g., PHP traditionally had better support for mySQL than for competing databases, so if you were building an app in PHP, you probably used mySQL for data storage. These effects may have weakened over time as the graph of ecosystem integrations has grown more complete (and indeed I feel like I hear less about acronym stacks these days than I did half a decade ago), but I don't think they've died out entirely.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#42
post #27

What is really annoying is that Cloudflare pages will strip the file extension off of your html pages, and perform permanent redirects to those new URLs. Now if you're intending on moving to a new hosting service that doesn't do that (cgi-bin), all Google search results to your site will 404. Github pages and likely others also supports this format, so moving between those two services doesn't exhibit this problem. M…

Having .html file extensions is very old school, and its removal is one of the popular/default redirects on all http servers that support it. Site generators also hide it through various methods (e.g. having a folder with the path name with just an index.html where a dynamic redirect isn't possible).

Yes. New school's defining feature is needless layering of complexity to hide the simple truth of the file system from users.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pretty easily change from Cloudflare to any other Jamstack host. Cgi just isn't necessary anymore and would be more baggage than anything at this point. The old web stacks are just time sinks. It's so much nicer to be able to git push... And that's it. Done.

Forgive my digression but for years I’ve seen small efforts here and there to elevate the concept of a “stack” and promote it as the level abstraction to use when discussing web apps and the like. What’s up with that? Grab any 3 commonly used pieces of technology whose names can be used to form a fun initialism, append stack to the end, and soon there will be experts speaking at conferences dedicated to it. JamStack…

It's been around since forever. Things like LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), etc.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#45

What is really annoying is that Cloudflare pages will strip the file extension off of your html pages, and perform permanent redirects to those new URLs. Now if you're intending on moving to a new hosting service that doesn't do that (cgi-bin), all Google search results to your site will 404. Github pages and likely others also supports this format, so moving between those two services doesn't exhibit this problem. M…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but Apache httpd has performed URL rewriting such as adding a .html suffix after mapping URLs to file names where appropriate, and other transformations such as content negotiation for languages, spelling correction, etc. for ages.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#46
The Cloudflare cloud experience is "being sold short by subpar documentation" right now because important elements of their ecosystem are being ramped up from beta status. They also have internal docs which aren't kept up to date with their actual product. I'd check back in a few months because their beta experience can be very touch-and-go.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#47
post #27

What is really annoying is that Cloudflare pages will strip the file extension off of your html pages, and perform permanent redirects to those new URLs. Now if you're intending on moving to a new hosting service that doesn't do that (cgi-bin), all Google search results to your site will 404. Github pages and likely others also supports this format, so moving between those two services doesn't exhibit this problem. M…

Having .html file extensions is very old school, and its removal is one of the popular/default redirects on all http servers that support it. Site generators also hide it through various methods (e.g. having a folder with the path name with just an index.html where a dynamic redirect isn't possible).

Site generators hiding it is not a problem for portability. Supporting that redirect is also not a problem! Permanent redirects are.

Also, old-school is still the dominant way with how small sites are hosted, in terms of number of hosting providers who offer cgi hosting.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#48

What is really annoying is that Cloudflare pages will strip the file extension off of your html pages, and perform permanent redirects to those new URLs. Now if you're intending on moving to a new hosting service that doesn't do that (cgi-bin), all Google search results to your site will 404. Github pages and likely others also supports this format, so moving between those two services doesn't exhibit this problem. M…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but Apache httpd has performed URL rewriting such as adding a .html suffix after mapping URLs to file names where appropriate, and other transformations such as content negotiation for languages, spelling correction, etc. for ages.

Cloudflare automatically redirects any /foo.html URL to /foo, with a permanent redirect. That is certainly not standard behavior, neither on httpd nor gh pages

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#49

Side note: As someone who wanted a high level overview of Durable Objects, the Cloudflare announcement page 404s https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-durable-obje...

Thanks for catching this. Not sure what happened exactly but jiggling the handle (republishing the post) seems to have fixed it.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just don't want to support MiTMFlare with our traffic and money.

Cloudflare reports 50% quarter growth year over year, it sounds to me you're in a minuscule minority.

That the majority does it does not mean its a good thing.
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