[ Thanks to Cedric
GODART for this link. ]
“At least this much is clear, though. Forget about .NET for the
moment. The language neutrality that already exists in the
Microsoft space is something that the Linux and open source worlds
could really use. Sure, we have — for example — mod_perl and
mod_python for Apache. But a great deal of effort was invested in
making these things available. In the case of mod_perl,
extraordinary and heroic measures were needed on Doug MacEachern’s
part to make this amazing piece of software.As a result, mod_perl
is rather idiosyncratic.”
“Heroic measures should not have been needed. Apache really
ought to have, not just a request-processing API that can be bound
once per programming language, but something akin to the ActiveX
scripting interface that would solve the problem once for all
programming languages that want to use Apache’s request-processing
services. (Were this the case, integration of Zope with Apache
— to take just one example — might be considerably less the
headache than it currently is.) Likewise, Perl and Python ought to
plug into the other end of that same standard scripting interface
on Unix/Linux, as they do on Windows thanks to the efforts of
ActiveState. That would mean that not just Apache, but any
scripting-interface-compliant Unix application could be used by any
scripting-interface-compliant language.”