It seems that basic web sites made by uploading html and other files are going extinct, in favor of web apps like CMSs and blogs. As a result, the majority of the functionality provided by web servers like Apache is becoming unnecessary.
As an example, any web app which interfaces with Apache via Rack [rubyforge.org]middleware needs only the enabling of mod_rack. Other than that, you don't need to touch apache2.conf. Apache basically just handles the sockets; the rest of its functionality goes unused.
The day of the static web page is indeed drawing to a close. With Facebook rewriting PHP into HipHop, other middleware products becoming capable of also serving content, and the general transition to "Web 2.0", the largely static Web of the '90's is nearer than ever to its eventual end.
Apache 1 has been an absolutely fantastic tool over the years, and even though it's well past its "sell-by" date, the fact that many have continued to use it says a lot about the overall quality and robustness. Thanks to
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @06:35PM (#31016030)
What you're heralding is nothing short of the eradication of a publicly accessible information pool. The registered-users-only part of Web 2.0 is basically opaque to external search engines. Links are nondescript blobs - short, short-lived and with at least one redirection through a slow third party server. If Web 1.0 was a library, Web 2.0 is a shopping mall. Banter and business, but hardly any real information.
I've recently shown a friend how to set up a web page the old fashioned way, i.e. write HTML with a text editor, edit, resize and prune images locally, upload through (S)FTP. He wouldn't have it any other way now. I know because I've tried integrating a common ad content management system. It was just too complicated: In the end, a multi-megabyte online script and database system was replaced with a handful of static files. The whole site is lightning fast, has absolutely no attack surface, is trivially easy to backup, works unmodified with every web space and doesn't overload the server, not even when the site is featured on high-traffic aggregators (i.e. slashdotted).
I think the advantages of static files are lost on people because they simply don't know any other way but online content management systems. When you "buy" web space nowadays, the feature list is full of pre-installed this, pre-installed that. In the end, most web pages are completely static and the servers are pointlessly creating a "dynamic" page from a static menu and static content on every page view. Nothing gained but a hard to maintain, always online content management system, which has poorly thought out security and a worse implementation. To call Web 2.0 the Windows of the web would be an insult to Windows.
What? Using passwords is not new to web apps. Apache itself supports passwords.
And using a CMS does not mean breaking linkability. Any RESTful CMS (like wikipedia) will provide links to data. Static pages have no monopoly on this.
Wikipedia is the moral equivalent of an old-school hyperlinked body of text, though, not really a dynamic website. It happens to be served dynamically, and can be edited by users, but at any instant in time there is a static snapshot of hypertext. In fact, it could've been implemented that way--- as a bunch of static HTML files that get edited. That's in contrast to AJAXy webapps, which don't really make sense to think of as hypertext.
web servers to app servers (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems that basic web sites made by uploading html and other files are going extinct, in favor of web apps like CMSs and blogs. As a result, the majority of the functionality provided by web servers like Apache is becoming unnecessary.
As an example, any web app which interfaces with Apache via Rack [rubyforge.org]middleware needs only the enabling of mod_rack. Other than that, you don't need to touch apache2.conf. Apache basically just handles the sockets; the rest of its functionality goes unused.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:web servers to app servers (Score:1, Insightful)
What you're heralding is nothing short of the eradication of a publicly accessible information pool. The registered-users-only part of Web 2.0 is basically opaque to external search engines. Links are nondescript blobs - short, short-lived and with at least one redirection through a slow third party server. If Web 1.0 was a library, Web 2.0 is a shopping mall. Banter and business, but hardly any real information.
I've recently shown a friend how to set up a web page the old fashioned way, i.e. write HTML with a text editor, edit, resize and prune images locally, upload through (S)FTP. He wouldn't have it any other way now. I know because I've tried integrating a common ad content management system. It was just too complicated: In the end, a multi-megabyte online script and database system was replaced with a handful of static files. The whole site is lightning fast, has absolutely no attack surface, is trivially easy to backup, works unmodified with every web space and doesn't overload the server, not even when the site is featured on high-traffic aggregators (i.e. slashdotted).
I think the advantages of static files are lost on people because they simply don't know any other way but online content management systems. When you "buy" web space nowadays, the feature list is full of pre-installed this, pre-installed that. In the end, most web pages are completely static and the servers are pointlessly creating a "dynamic" page from a static menu and static content on every page view. Nothing gained but a hard to maintain, always online content management system, which has poorly thought out security and a worse implementation. To call Web 2.0 the Windows of the web would be an insult to Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
What? Using passwords is not new to web apps. Apache itself supports passwords.
And using a CMS does not mean breaking linkability. Any RESTful CMS (like wikipedia) will provide links to data. Static pages have no monopoly on this.
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia is the moral equivalent of an old-school hyperlinked body of text, though, not really a dynamic website. It happens to be served dynamically, and can be edited by users, but at any instant in time there is a static snapshot of hypertext. In fact, it could've been implemented that way--- as a bunch of static HTML files that get edited. That's in contrast to AJAXy webapps, which don't really make sense to think of as hypertext.
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia is a web app. This disproves your claim that web apps can't be linked.
Q to the E to the D.
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't, though. It's just a bunch of hypertext plus a text editor.