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Reply-To: "Gelu Kelunden" <gelu.kelu@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 21:02:06 +0300
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Subject: CGI and FastCGI SAPI
From: gelu.kelu@gmail.com ("Gelu Kelunden")

Hi,

I'm trying to understand how difficult it is to create a new SAPI, so I 
started to poke my nose inside the "cgi" SAPI source code. I saw that 
"cgi_main.c" implements both the CGI and the FastCGI protocols and I kinda 
got lost inside all those if-else lines (I tried to take out the FastCGI 
code and failed miserably). I'm wondering if it's not better to have 2 
different SAPIs, one for CGI and for FastCGI.

Advantages of this "split" would be:
- the source code will be more readable without all those if-else statements
- we would have 2 executables that do 2 different jobs, unlike now where 
php-cgi does both; each executable could then be further optimized for the 
exact job they are performing

Disadvantages I see:
- maintaning 2 SAPI implementaion would require more work (since CGI and 
FastCGI both share most of the SAPI code, any change would have to be 
replicated twice)
- break backward compatibility (where php-cgi handles both CGI and FastCGI)

Thank you for your time,
Gelu