In a great example of convergence, I have been bumping into FastCGI
and Apache 2.x all over the place lately. I was able to beg Paul Querna (congrats on
being voted in as a member!) into giving me a module writing
tutorial at ApacheCon (where the previously mentioned
mod_wombat was born) specifically with the intention of
putting my money where my mouth is helping with Apache 2 and FastCGI
(or Zed Shaw's new SCGI module).
It turns out Paul has beaten me to the punch -- he and Garrett Rooney already have
work going on
mod_proxy_fcgi in httpd trunk. This should provide
remote fcgi instances, all the goodness from
mod_proxy_balancer, and places FastCGI in the core of
the web server instead of as a third party module! Awesome! It's
being worked on in the trunk, but I offered (the email is still in
my outbox as I am offline at the moment) to help maintain a 2.2
branch as I'd like to be able to use this Real Soon Now. Of course I
have no C or httpd credentials, but that is what patches are
for. Hopefully this can be made to work. I used to hack
C/C++... a decade ago =) Scrape the rust off and we'll see how it
goes.
Along the way I learned that Nick Kew had patched the
existing mod_fcgi to work against HTTPD 2.2. The catch
is there has been a lot of FUD about mod_fcgi and
Apache 2.x, but no one I know has been able to cite exactly what the
problem is, just a nebulous "there are issues."
So, big request, if you have had issues with mod_fcgi and Apache 2, please email me ( brianm@apache.org ) or the FastCGI Developers list and I promise to try and get things fixed even if I have to fix it myself (which would not be real-soon-now as my C is pretty derned tootin rusty, unfortunately, but it'd happen!) but I get the feeling a lot of the httpd hackers would like to lay this to rest =)