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 :)
Honestly, there's a lot of beauty in that simplicity, I can definitely imagine someone also wanting to work with mod_php in Apache as well (just a module for the web server).
That said, FastCGI and similar technologies were inevitable and something like PHP-FPM isn't much more difficult to actually run in practice.
Still, having a clearly defined request lifecycle in wonderful, especially when compared to something how Java application servers like Tomcat/Glassfish used to work with Servlets - things there have gotten better and easier too, but still...
Agree. I also loved the simplicity. It’s not that different from Serverless, if you look at it.
There is an HTTP server handling all the HTTP stuff and process launching (which is handled by API Gateway in AWS, for example), and the communication between it and the “script” just uses language or OS primitives instead of more complex APIs.
The 2000s were quite wild in how things changed… suddenly you have giant frameworks that also parse HTTP, a reverse proxy. At some point even PHP became all about frameworks.
I wonder if we wouldn’t have a more open, standardized and mature version of CGI/Serverless if it had been a more gradual transition rather than a couple of very abrupt paradigm shifts.
Here is a very simple example from the original sources: https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi/blob/master/hede.pas