SCGI - Python-Ruby Pollination

Python roots help Ruby on Rails: Neil Schemenauer was behind the creation of SCGI, a simple, high performance replacement for CGI, first implemented for the Quixote web framework. I wonder if Neil expected it to become so popular for other languages —Ruby on Rails for example now has SCGI Ruby on Rails Runner and some 25,000 other hits on Google and growing.

SCGI is supported on Apache via Neil’s mod_scgi work; also native support is available in the now very popular lighttpd; maybe these Cherokee folks will get with the program one day too:

> you might also want to take a look at scgi
> http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/scgi/
>
> seems to have a lot of the advantages of fast CGI
> but it’s simpler.

Yeah, I know it. It isn’t supported in the main stream just because it doesn’t seem to be very useful. I mean, at this moment, only a few Python guys are supporting that approach. Anyway, as you said, it is really easy to implement, so if it gets more popular we can write it down quickly.

Probably time now, as interest has moved way beyond just a few Python guys now, even within the Python community alone; and now Rails has pretty much guaranteed popularity for SCGI. Support for SCGI is on my web server check-list now, I wouldn’t consider adopting a general purpose web server unless it offered SCGI.

PS: QP, a Durus-centric, Quixote-inspired, web framework, made SCGI as one of its design decisions (at this point that means Windows users need not apply).