Question: MacOS X Bundled Apache Server or Embeded Web Server?

[Andre Garzia]

Hi Folks,

I am building my soon to be released web application development  
thingy. I am bundling all my libraries (and some third party with  
credits), docs and example.

But since I talked with Dan and others during RevConWest, I decided  
that the most important part of this package is the out-of-the-box  
experience. The hardest thing about CGI and WebApps for rev users is  
usually setting up the environment. The idea is to develop locally  
and then deploy when ready. I can't really build this for Windows, I  
expect help on that later. So the idea is that there's a home stack  
that sets everything up.

Till today I was bundling the LiteSpeed Web Server <http:// 
www.litespeedtech.com> server with the package. The server would be  
all set up out of the box so that you could just launch and play. The  
problem is, the thing is not running CGIs, the plain old ones... they  
run once, then the server deadlocks. ARGH!!!! I thought about using  
cherokee web server <http://www.0x50.org/> but then, it comes out in  
source form and when it compiles it hard code some paths for the  
dynamic loading libraries, so you cannot really build it and then  
just bundle. You must compile it for each installation. Thats the  
same trouble with Lighttp <http://www.lighttpd.net/>, and building it  
with static options makes a huge server like 158mb and still it hard  
code the paths.

The MacOS X Apache server is not ready for FastCGI, for that we need  
to install the modules, which is easy. Actually thats not hard,  
simple commands and a revolution made stack could drive that  
installation easy. But again MacOS X out-of-the-box lacks the needed  
C compiler for that, only those that installed XCode development  
tools have the needed stuff to build Apache Modules.

So here I am. The little servers all have some trouble or another,  
the MacOS X bundled one is fine, but again, you need to download 1GB  
XCode tools just to build simple couple megs apache module...

any clue out there folks? is there any autoconf magician here that  
can build a lighttp install with relative paths instead of absolute  
ones (I tried and it didn't like).

Can we use otool to rewrite the linkers absolute path using a  
relative one like we do for frameworks (using @executable_path).

Argh, I am looking for help.

Andre