Re: [Text-forge-devel] Text::Forge and PAR

[Maurice A. <ma...@re...>]

Aaron Patterson wrote:
 > I think another thing that might be cool, is to have text forge fetch
 > the file depending on the URL provided.  For instance
 > par:https://foo.com/archive.par!/templates would fetch the par file to
 > use over https (other possibilities would be nfs, webdav, etc).  Also,
 > possibly caching the archive on startup.  That would make deploying your
 > archive pretty darn easy, just restart apache to re-read the archive.
 > Of course it would also make a single point of failure, and possibly be
 > susceptible to man in the middle attacks, but it sure would be cool.
 >
 > What do you think?

That's what I was thinking too. I started reading Apache::PAR though and
I think we can make some changes to it that will really simply this.

The thing is, there's no reason why Apache::PAR can't unzip the archive
behind-the-scenes to a temp directory. And if we introduce a new
substitution for the web.conf file (like ##TEMPDIR##), then we can
reconfigure the app to use that temp directory.

I think that's a much cleaner approach, since you don't need to modify
any modules and in fact all the Apache::PAR::* subclasses become
unnecessary. There would be no performance penalty for static content,
you wouldn't need the caching layer, etc. Everything would just work.

I've pitched the idea to Nathan and he seems very receptive although he
(understandably) wants to maintain backward compatibility. But it sounds
like we will get this in place. I'll keep you updated.

Maurice