Re: adding support for PHP to a web server

Hi!

naive question - can I just exec php and pipe input and output? There is probably some good reason that is not obvious to me.

The good reasons for using FCGI are: - environment passing - headers handling - POST passing - stderr handling - performance - creating new process is very expensive - structure - people already thought about a bunch of things when creating this protocol that may not be obvious at first - wide support - a lot of FCGI implementations exist, both server and client There's also SCGI which is much simpler than FCGI but no official PHP driver for it yet (it's really so simple you could probably implement it in PHP too, but lose some of the advantages). -- Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ (408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com