quickserv VS sozluk-cgi

> Zero external configuration, other than telling your webserver to enable CGI on your file

This is only true if you've done it before, and know what you're doing. In reality, it looks like a mess of `mod_cgi` configuration, trying different combinations of file permissions, finding the magic `cgi_bin` directory, finding the right obscure log files when there are inevitably errors, wrestling with CORS and other subtleties of HTTP headers, and other complexities that are only easy to navigate if you're already an experienced CGI user.

That being said, I love the philosophy of using CGI for scripts. Instead of using CGI itself, though, I wrote a (single-file, statically-linked) web server called "QuickServ" to bring this philosophy into the twenty-first century. It has all of the upside of CGI, but is much easier to set up and run, especially for beginners.

One of its benefits is that it automatically parses submitted HTTP forms, and converts the form fields to command line arguments. That means it's extremely easy to put existing CLIs on the web with minimal changes other than writing an HTML form front-end.

If you like CGI, I will (shamelessly) ask that you check it out!

https://github.com/jstrieb/quickserv

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29002694

This is awesome! This occupies a similar niche to—and might pair well with—my user friendly, single-binary webserver with CGI-like capabilities called QuickServ. When I released that here, one of the comments was that it would be nice to have WebSocket support. Now, I can just point people to this!

https://github.com/jstrieb/quickserv

Using CGI protocol on a Windows server. IIS (Windows' own web server) basically interfaces with executables by running them, feeding them HTTP headers, and server variables through environment variables, and gets the response HTTP headers and the body from their STDOUT. It's very inefficient, of course, since every request requires spawning a new copy of the executable, but it had worked fine in its first months :)

Here is a very simple example from the original sources: https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi/blob/master/hede.pas

I wrote Eksi Sozluk, the most popular Turkish social platform to date, back in 1999 using Delphi as CGI executables[1]. Delphi was the tool that I knew best, and CGI worked for me at the beginning. I almost immediately started having problems with EXE files constantly active, making updates impossible (as it was Windows based), which required restarting the server for any kind of update.

CGI executables also caused problems when I switched to an Alpha AXP RISC server which emulated x86, bringing the performance to a crawl. That made me switch to classic ASP, and about 10 years later, to ASP.NET MVC with routing, unit tests, abstractions, jQuery, all the shiny things at the time.

Web didn't stop there of course; there came SPA's, React, Vue and whatnot.

Now, seeing the yearning for CGI in 2023 feels funny. Have we come full circle? :)

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[1] https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi