[Xitami] Xitami/5 - new project announcement

Sun Jan 4 21:48:23 CET 2009

Russel,

A detailed set of requirements!

Would you be able to write-up these on the wiki?  I guess the useful
thing for now is just to collect ideas and requirements (things people
use or really want) so that we don't lose them.

Obviously it'll take some time to work through this list but I assume
anyone still using Xitami has the patience of a saint to begin with.

-Pieter

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 9:30 PM, rolinger <rolinger1 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have been using Xtiami 2.4d9 for years...made the upgrade to 2.5 and had
> problems so I went back to 2.4d9.  Xitami has crashed but ONCE in 6 years
> (and the fix was to stop the service and restart it, but even that can be
> managed with Windows Services properties).  And through those 6 years I
> moved Xitami to NT, to W2K, and now its on W2K3.  I had more problems with
> windows than I ever did with Xitami.
>
> Heres a brief list of things I think should be added or considered:
>
> 1. Full PHP implementation
> 2. Continued CGI support
>        a.  Without CGI support, the bulk of current Xitami users won't have
> an upgrade path and may never cut over because there current websites are so
> heavily coded in Perl.  I have one website alone that is about 48,000 lines
> of perl - I sure as heck don't look forward to migrating that code.
>        b.  Perl is such an efficient and well documented language that
> allows users to interface with system commands.  My experience with PHP is
> that its not as easy and has less features when it comes to system
> interfacing.
>        c.  Isn't Perl the foundation of PHP anyway?  :-)
> 3.  Self Installing Windows version is probably a must - but GUIs aren't
> necessary.  The web based admin and text config editing is more than
> sufficient.  Obvioulsy it needs to be a service install for windows.
> 4.  I don't see the need to implement MySQL specific support like
> "WAMP"...in my experience users choose different DBs for various reaons,
> keeping it open to and versatile to other DBs is going to be a more
> attractive webserver and it will keep Xitami's memory and system foot print
> much smaller.
> 5. VB/ASP support is probably necessary as well.
>
> 6.  Xitamis's I/O management of file uploads needs to be fixed.  Currently
> Xitami locks the filehandles of standard html file uploads.  Also, Xitami
> treats a 20 file upload as a single transfer. And because of this you can't
> read the current status of the file upload (whether its one or 20 files)
> which prevents you from providing progress updates to the user.  A 5mg
> upload could take a few minutes and without a status update for the user
> they may think things have timed out and abort.    This same issue which
> prevents you from reading the status of the IO also prevents you from
> writing data to a temporary file during the upload, for some reason while
> Xitami is reading and writing the inbound data stream, it can't write to
> another temporary file, another method for obtaining the current upload
> status. AND the returning web page doesn't not appear until the upload is
> done.  So on big uploads, or multi-file uploads the user stares at blank
> page.
>
>    Example code of file upload:
>
> binmode(OUTFILE);
> undef $BytesRead;
> undef $Buffer;
> open(tmpFile, ">/temp/blahblahblah.tmp") ;
> while ($Bytes = read($file_handle,$Buffer,1024)) {
>   $BytesRead += $Bytes;
>   print tmpFile $
>   print OUTFILE $Buffer;
> }
> $confirm{$file_handle} = $BytesRead;
> close($file_handle);
> close(OUTFILE);
>
> If I were to write to a temp file in the middle of that while loop, the temp
> file would only be updated AFTER the while loop/upload was completed.  I
> have no idea why though.  I then used the same code on Apache it worked as
> designed.
>
> 7. I have gotten my own version of Mod Rewrite to work on Xitami, though it
> would be nice to see a more uniform implementation of it supported.  There
> is still a bit of manual configs at the server level that one has to do.
> URL rewrites are key for Seach Engine Optimization.  I used CGI aliases to
> map a keywords to specific scripts, then those scripts needed the HTML_ENV
> or CGI ENV variables to break up the the url path to retrieve the rest of
> the dynamic variables
>    [CGI ALIAS]
>    /adList/ = "/cgi-bin/postList.pl"
>
>    And then in postList.pl used the following to retrieve the variables:
>    @pathVars = split(/\//,$ENV{'PATH_INFO'}) ; ### split the URL path on
> '/'
>    @httpHost = split(/\./,$ENV{'HTTP_HOST'}) ;  ### split the full domain
> name on the '.'
>
>    Whats handy about the CGI Alias is that $ENV believes the url path
> starts AFTER the alias
>    So: www.blah.com/adlist/these/are/dynamic/vars - $ENV sees the URL as
> /these/are/dynamic/vars
>    I then do: /adlist/these/are/dynamic/vars/ad_12345.html , using the
> 'ad_12345.html' as the article ID
>
>    Each script must know whats a variable...so it does require a bit of
> unique coding per script, but if you design your site well enough you can
> basically write your own procs to do it all for you.
>
> 8.  32bit and 64bit versions should be available.
>
> 9.  Ditch the FTP stuff.  It never worked well to begin with.
>
> 10.  Fix the vitual server administration issue.  If I create a virtual
> domain and give administration authority to another user, that user with
> their own password designed to administer the virtual domain now has access
> to the entire server configuration.
>
> 11. Continued support for perlssi
>
> 12. Supply password encryption in the .aut files....clear text passwords is
> a big no-no.
>
> 13. Make Extended CLF logging the standard format
>
> 14.  Allow for better control of default Error pages, 301 redirects to
> failed pages, or pages not found, to a standard error page
>
> 15. Is it possible to integrate sessionID directly into the server?
>
> Thats all I can think of at the moment.  :-)
>
> -Russel
>
> =========
> "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance,
> and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
>     - Sir Winston Churchill -
> =========
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Pieter Hintjens" <ph at imatix.com>
> To: "Xitami Users General Discussion" <xitami at lists.xitami.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 6:37 AM
> Subject: Re: [Xitami] Xitami/5 - new project announcement
>
>
>> Hi Marc,
>>
>> This feedback is great.  I'm collecting pertinent points on the wiki.
>> Feel free to add more.  No firm promises, but it would be good to
>> collect the strongest features of the old Xitami into the new
>> architecture and get back to regular releases of the product.
>>
>> Can I confirm that people are generally happy with a plain vanilla
>> binary for Windows, i.e. the console version?  Making win32-specific
>> services and GUIs is a lot of work.
>>
>> -Pieter
>>
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>>
>
>
>
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>

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