Plack Vs FastCGI

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Plack Vs FastCGI

May 16, 2011 by Jared

I’ve been sold on Plack for a while. This clarifies a part of the reason nicely¹.

If you design a fibonacci() function, would you make it print the result to STDOUT, or return the result as a return value?

(It’s referring to the PSGI spec rather than Plack, but I figure the latter needs press a bit more)

Quick thought though – if a page takes a long time to generate, the stdout technique can deliver a bit at a time. Is there a plack plugin for that, or is the answer to go for ajax these day and deliver the page outline asap?

1. Namely that printing to stdout always seemed like a horrible and inefficient hack.

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Posted in Perl | Tagged plack | 3 Comments

3 Responses

on May 16, 2011 at 07:14 Douglas Wilson

If you know your page is going to take a long time to generate output and would like to send the output progressively, there is an answer for this is the PSGI specification: the returned value from the application can be a subroutine reference. See http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/PSGI-1.03/PSGI.pod#Delayed_Reponse_and_Streaming_Body
on May 16, 2011 at 07:59 Jared

Of course, streaming like a comet app. Why didn’t I think of that. Thanks Doug.
on May 16, 2011 at 11:15 Jakub Narębski

From PSGI specification:

The response body is returned from the application in one of following two types of scalar variable:
[...]
* An IO::Handle-like object or a built-in filehandle.

[...]

PSGI interface allows applications and servers optionally handle callback-style response (instead of three-element array reference) to delay the HTTP response and stream content (server push).