[MTOS-dev] Experimental Dispatcher

[Byrne Reese]

Thank you for investing the time to assemble a working prototype. This is
very helpful. Here are some of my thoughts:

* I cannot agree more that migrating towards a more standard and widely
adopted CGI dispatching framework has many benefits in theory and in
principal. But I want to ensure is that the migration has concrete benefits
that solves existing problems.

* Is this the right time? Introducing such a low level change might seem
more appropriate for a major version (e.g. MT 5.0).

* How would this impact MT's set of prerequisites. Does it help reduce the
amount of software required we need to bundle with the core? Does it
increase it? Does it required compiled modules?

  - *Any* change that makes it harder for people to install MT, even in the
slightest is of serious concern for me. MT has reputation-enough of being
hard to install, no change should compound that.

* Finally, if we are to embark on this project in 4.x then what is the
potential impact to existing plugins? What is the level of effort needed to
port over the existing code base? What type of instability are we likely to
introduce as a result of the change?

---

All of my apparent pessimism aside, I have a lot of faith that a move to
CGI::Application is the right thing to do. I just want to make sure we cover
all of our bases. And we definitely need to have others weigh in on this
discussion -- obviously.


On 2/3/08 11:43 AM, "Reed A. Cartwright" <reed at scit.us> wrote:

> Hirotaka Ogawa wrote:
>> 
>> I am not so confident of incorporating your dispatcher into MTOS
>> source tree.  Most important reason is that we don't exactly know what
>> advantages this code give to us.
> 
> I'm not sure either, other than the fact that it makes supporting
> FastCGI, CGI, and mod_perl more centralized and easier to manage.  I
> think shifting MT::App over to CGI::Application falls in the category of
>   changes that help migrate MTOS from using homebrew solutions to using
> established libraries.  It'd probably help MTOS cutdown on memory leaks.
> 
> As far as CA-Dispatch, it has a really nice ability to dynamically load
> app modules.  No more coding of .cgi or .fcgi scripts to execute an app,
> having the .pm file is all you need.  It can also clean up our urls,
> e.g.: http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt/cms/edit/entry/2/1054/.
> 
> I'm sure Tim can chime in on other suggestions since he actually has
> experience with CGI::Application.