A Comparison of Portable Dynamic Web Content Technologies for the Apache Server

Apache is considered to be the most extensible, secure and widely used server on the Internet. On our talk we focus on its first characteristic, extensibility, analyzing many techniques used to provide dynamic content. Available solutions are based either on extensions to the web server itself or on the execution of userspace programs. These solutions include, among others, CGI scripts, PHP, mod perl, mod python and Java Servlets. For each technology we present its basic design goals and the development facilities it offers. We compare the efficiency of these technologies by means of custom-made benchmarks we run to measure each solution’s throughput. Finally, we present each technique’s drawbacks, with references to lessons learned during the complete deploy-and-test process.