Question

I am in need of a scalable and performant HTTP application/server that will be used for static file serving/uploading. So I only need support for GET and PUT operations.

However, there are a few extra features that I need:

• Custom authentication: I need to
  check credentials against a database for each request.
  Thus I must be able to integrate propietary
  database interaction.
• Support for
  signed access keys: The access to
  resources via PUT should be signed
  using a key like http://uri/?key=foo The key then contains information about the request like md5(user + path + secret) which allows me to block unwanted requests. The application/server should allow me to check for this.
• Performance: I’d like to avoid piping content as much as possible. Otherwise the whole application could be implemented in Perl/etc. in a few lines as CGI.

Perlbal (in webserver mode) looks nice, however the single-threaded model does not fit with my database lookup and it does also not support query strings.

Lighttp/Nginx/… have some modules for these tasks, however it is not feasible putting everything together without ending up writing own extensions/modules.

So how would you solve this? Are there other leightweight webservers available for this?
Should I implement an application inside of a webserver (i.e. CGI). How can I avoid/speed up piping content between the webserver and my application.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Have a look at nodejs http://nodejs.org/

There are a few modules for static web servers and database interfaces:
http://wiki.github.com/ry/node/modules

You might have to write your own file upload handler, or use one from this example http://www.componentix.com/blog/13