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Entries published on January 10, 2008

1 entry published on this date. See also: all entries published in January 2008, full archive.

Web frameworks and web hosts

Today John Gruber linked to a post on the official Dreamhost blog lamenting the state of web-framework deployment on consumer-level shared hosting; while the post itself is largely concerned with Ruby on Rails, the current state of deploying popular (non-PHP-based) web frameworks on hosts like Dreamhost is, well, abysmal. A search for “dreamhost” in the archives of the django-users mailing list turns up nearly five hundred results, many of them people struggling to get Django working, and I imagine that similar searches of list archives for other frameworks would turn up similar numbers of problems.

So. What’s so hard about this, and what can be done to improve the situation?

The problem

Well. Actually, “problems”. As I see it, there are three major issues facing frameworks on shared hosting.

First off, the new wave of popular frameworks all make a clean break from a traditional CGI-style model where the application is …

Entry published January 10, 2008. Read full entry.