[Templates] mod_tt - whither the enthusiasm?

[Tom Insam]

> http://jerakeen.org/code/mod_tt/ describes the module as 'a very early
> development version,' which certainly means I cannot use it in
> production. 

A lot of the reason for the module was a 'can I do this?'. I got it to 
the point that it built and rendered .tt files, asked the TT list about 
it, and stopped till I got more feedback.

> It still looks interesting to me: TT2 was alpha once too, I suppose. But
> how is mod_tt implimented? Does it require mod_perl or just perl? What
> are the benchmarks against a more standard TT implementation? Doesn't TT
> have caching support? 

It doesn't need mod_perl, that was the point, really. My plan at the 
time was that mod_perl was irritatingly hard to build, not very reliable 
as a module instead of properly built into apache (which was even harder 
to build - ever built mod_ssl and mod_perl linked into the same httpd?) 
and _far_ too powerful (I really don't need to be able to write my 
httpd.conf in perl).

mod_tt also runs every request in a separate perl instance, so that 
different templates in different vhosts can't interfere with each other. 
It's impossible to run more than one mod_perl application in a single 
apache process in a secure fashion.

Benchmarks? Yikes. The thing runs. That's as far as I got, frankly. The 
startup time of TT is _nuts_, so if I wanted to keep the 'distinct 
interpreter per processes' thing, it would be slow. Probably better 
would be something like the way mod_python handles things - you get a 
separate python context per vhost, with apache directives you can use to 
either use the same instance between hosts, or further subdivide inside 
the tree. Somewhere there's a long TODO list for the thing..

> If I wrote a HOWTO on TT/mod_perl installation, would that remove the
> need for mod_tt?

Not really. One of the points of mod_tt was a statement of 'look, this 
could theoretically compete with php'. You drop .tt files into a folder, 
and it works. No ISP would ever give you mod_perl shared hosting, but if 
mod_tt was reliable and stable, I could see them offering _that_. But 
maybe not. The world has moved on a little since then, we have Catalyst 
and Rails and Django, and hundreds of other frameworks - the Large 
Heavyweight Framework With Templating Engine pattern is the hip thing to 
be playing with now.

Plus, as far as I'm concerned, mod_perl installation consists of apt-get 
install libapache-mod-perl most of the time.

tom