I agree with the author in fact I host my web site using CGI with zero issues. From people who discredits CGI I would like to see, in addition to personal opinions, a clear proof of the fact that it is not suitable for production in professional web sites expecially low traffic ones.
I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#52There's an important point I haven't seen discussed yet: I don't believe it's possible to write secure web apps without a templating engine with safe-by-default XSS handling (i.e. interpolated text is sanitized, unless explicitly marked as trusted HTML somehow), which implies some amount of a web framework or at least a web-specific library.
I think important point is distinction between:
a) static documents - basically HTML+CSS and no scripts on the back-end
There is not much to discuss here a lot of stuff could be just that but people don't want to write blog posts directly in html :) We have static site generators that are doing great so it seems to be working well.
b) dynamic documents - you get data from DB based on query, like list of phone numbers in Texas and want to find specific city
Static page generators would not be that useful if one wants to reflect changes from db. Queries are also nicer in db than having insane long list on page with CTRL-F. I would say a CGI only thing would work great for such use case. You probably want to thing about SQL injections but as it is browse only then might not be an issue.
c) web applications - here people want all bells and whistles
Security is important as you probably need authentication and preventing XSS is quite important here. I would never build web application with only CGI - security headers are not that hard to add. But authentication and authorization + XSS prevention is really hard. Then you have lots of requests that send/filter data. You can have problems with SQL injection as you have to store some users and their passwords and their data, framework+orm helps preventing a lot of troubles. One probably should not use a framework for making his blog/static-page. Unfortunately nowadays most people build web apps.
This is what rubs me with posts about "you don't need X framework, it all should be static documents", well yes you don't need big framework if you build personal website. You probably need one if you build a web app. Downside is we have HTML+CSS as interface that was designed as document framework and not as application interface building framework. That is why we need a back end and front end frameworks.
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit better but one process can only process one request at a time. You need a lot more processes compared to a http framework processing http requests in parallel.
How do those web frameworks gain the ability to process things in parallel? What prevents a ‘single process’ from adopting those same methods?
how many features can your process accumulate before it's called a framework?
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has no place in todays world except of educational use. That's overly strong. I will create a CGI app every now and then. I can use basically any language I want. Not a lot of thought has to go into it. As the article says, it's a simple approach that makes sense for those of us that aren't so familiar with web development (we're usually making those apps for ourselves). In particular, the "you can never have to…
I think its just that everyone on hacker news likes to pretend they have to scale to the size of google even though most people aren't even in the same ballpark.
Currently trying to order room service in a hotel from xxxxx.menu.org.Uk
It isn’t loading, just sits there spinning. Pile of shit. I wish they’d chosen to write the service as a reliable cgi rather than some web framework where errors are eaten and hidden in Ajax calls.
Uber eats let’s me place the order then vanishes when it comes to paying.
Nandos yesterday told me error UK03 when I tried ordering in the restaurant, slightly better, but perhaps those more concerned with scaling to a million concurrent users could deal with 1000 reliably first.
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#55The reason most Python folks moved away from CGI more than two decades ago now is that the performance is terrible. The interpreter startup time (plus any time executing module imports) has to run per request. This is much less of an issue for shell scripts which startup very quickly. The programming model does have its advantages though. Persistent servers risk leaking information across requests (seems to be a part…
Fastcgi solved that specific problem about minutes after CGI was invented.
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#56> Different units: traffic of visitors vs people running sites. I think we confuse them.
Yes we do. All. The. Freaking. Time.
It’s availability bias: most of the web sites we visit are popular and big and complex and have had to solve serious scalability issues. Most of the web sites we make have few visitors and are small and simple and do not have any scalability problem beyond the occasional aggregator hug.
Likewise, most of the software we use is big and complex and used by many. Most of the software we make have less than 10 users. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon… are everywhere, but a stupidly small proportion of companies in the world are as big as they are.
Mike Acton urges us all to "understand the data". That includes how much data we’ll be processing. How many request per days are we expecting? Are they evenly spaced, or will there be spikes? What’s considered acceptable latency? Stuff like that. Remember, the Pirate Bay at its most powerful only needed 4 rack servers, on top of each other. Very few of us will exceed the capacity of even a single server.
It’s not always easy to see, because the front page of HN (and the front page of pretty much anything for that matter) doesn’t feature the ordinary. So we only see the extraordinary, and get the impression that we have to measure up to that.
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#57CGI is awesome! My Go vanity URLs are served over CGI. The overhead is fine because only Go proxies access them once in a while and the only import is templating using Jinja in Python.
Deployed: https://k.malhotra.cc/go/
Code: https://hn.malhotra.cc/git/cgi_k-malhotra-cc/tree/script.py?...
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#58I'll always have a soft spot for Classic ASP[0]. Makes me dream of a simpler time developing CRUD apps. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages
Just use long variable names please. Had to debug an ASP site written in 2019 that used classic three letter variable names for everything and it was rough.
I have some old VBS ASP code around and it uses hungarian notation(!)
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#59CGI really is a beautiful abstraction. The reason we stopped using it 15+ years ago was performance: forking a new process for every incoming web request just didn't make sense on ~2000 era hardware. I wonder how true that is today, given that our machines have vastly more RAM and CPU? If you squint at them the right way AWS Lambda functions are pretty similar to the CGI model.
It's unusable today, more so than it was a decade ago: - modern frameworks have a much higher startup time (see Python imports, Java VM and other). CGI was fine to run a perl script with no dependencies. - it prevents any form of caching. caching is very important for many use cases. - it requires to open a fresh connection with every request, to the database and elsewhere (too bad if you thought you could use redis…
Wait a minute, how CGI is preventing anyone from reusing connections? The web server doesn’t have to cut connections between CGI requests, the same way it doesn’t have to cut connections between the delivery of two different static files.
Maybe current web servers are written in such a way that they do cut connections between CGI requests, but I’d be surprised if they really have to.
Re: I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
#60I'll always have a soft spot for Classic ASP[0]. Makes me dream of a simpler time developing CRUD apps. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages
I really wish I’d had a chance to use ASP in an environment doing it properly, rather than the cowboy atmosphere of a tiny web agency. If I understand correctly the idea was that you’d use a proper language for your core business logic which then gets compiled into DLLs loaded by your ASP application, which could then use VBScript for the simple template logic. Sadly I was at an agency which (I suspect like many othe…
That was the theory, but in practice people spent a lot of time debugging the transaction server and cleaning out the registry, trying to figure out why their components weren't working. I think we had something like 50K lines of VBS and it was alright because the code was decently structured.