If you’re using CGI or FCGI, then you’re using a general web server that is probably serving lots of different applications.
These days, folks often write the app to contain a web server. Write your app in JavaScript, pull in a dependency that serves HTTP, write enough code to route requests and start the server listening- welcome to Node. Python and Ruby offer the same. Swift gets this functionality from Kitura and Vapor. I’ve experienced C and C++ varieties.
Back in the day when Apache was seriously hot, mimicking today’s architecture would have meant writing an Apache module - the app would then live within the server and no communication channel/pipe/socket/fork/spawn would be required.
Yes but the poster, above, is complaining about using CGI with a server. My question is, if you're not using CGI/fastCGI with Apache or nginx for example, what is he suggesting should be used instead?
Which comes back to my question. Can one do that with apache and nginx? I'm pretty sure I've seen methods for this in Apache but only the paid version of nginx. Am I wrong?
Today, app servers are mostly separated from front-end servers because, it turns out, it's best to not hold on to too much memory and/or threads while waiting for a slow client to receive their stuff. So async servers like Nginx are used on the front tier and they knock to app servers over the net.
But Nginx does have a Lua module, and, I think, Perl. Afaik both are in the free version. Mostly used to augment configuration, or for lightweight interfacing directly with databases (ahem Redis and Memcached cough).
I mentioned Apache modules in my comment. Write a module, add it to Apache’s config, your code loads with the web server.
Looks like one can also write nginx modules, but I’m not familiar with nginx licensing to know if a purchase is required to use that in a commercial deployment.
It's not required, and in fact there's a big open source project taking advantage of that: OpenResty uses a module that loads LuaJIT into Nginx, and builds very fast applications into Nginx using Lua.
Using your language of choice: You open a socket on a port, listen for connections, when connection from client arrives read bytes from the socket, parse http request from those bytes, do something that may yield bytes in response, write the response bytes to the socket, close the socket (optional).
These days, folks often write the app to contain a web server. Write your app in JavaScript, pull in a dependency that serves HTTP, write enough code to route requests and start the server listening- welcome to Node. Python and Ruby offer the same. Swift gets this functionality from Kitura and Vapor. I’ve experienced C and C++ varieties.
Back in the day when Apache was seriously hot, mimicking today’s architecture would have meant writing an Apache module - the app would then live within the server and no communication channel/pipe/socket/fork/spawn would be required.