[Zope] fastcgi and ISP's -- alternatives?

[Jason Jones]

> BTW, I assume that you are aware of the commercial FastCGI
> support at www.fastcgi.org.

> If I was an ISP, I'd be wildly more receptive to mod_fastcgi (or mod_pcgi,
> if it existed) than a module that embedded a perl or python interpreter
> in the web server.
> 
> Jim
> 

And yet mod_php is wildly popular and a number of sites offer mod_perl as
well while mod_fastcgi doesn't seem to interest any of the ISP's (although I
have found one that does run it). BTW, while convincing them to use
mod_fastcgi seems hard, convincing ISP's to pay for a commercial engine is
next to impossible - I tried for months with a similar thing when I needed
servlet support and mod_jserv wasn't yet out. I don't have a clue why this
is, I'm just pointing it out.

What it really comes down to is acceptance and marketing. PHP is marketed
pretty well and it has a huge user base partly because it is an extremely
easy drop-in for Apache and was easy for ISP's to include, so that anyone
can get a cheap account and use it. PHP and MySQL is by far the most popular
Unix hosting account combination.

Zope is very much on the upswing in the public eye, but as of yet it isn't
easy for ISP's to adopt. Granted, it isn't just a language like PHP and will
always need special configuration, etc... but given the amount of space
devoted on this list to getting Zope running behind pcgi, and now fastcgi,
it's no wonder that ISP's aren't terribly interested.

If ISP's are going to pick up Zope they need something easy and they need
something identified with Zope specifically. mod_php is obviously php,
mod_zope would be zope. What the module specifically does (embeds python is
actually just fastcgi with an accompanying zope install, etc.,) doesn't seem
to be as important as the fact that it is identified directly with Zope and
is an easy process.

I know this sounds simplistic, but after calling ISP's over the past several
weeks it's a conclusion I can't help but come to.


Jason