Brown trousers time :~

[Paul Orrock]

Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
> Paul Orrock wrote:
>> If all this webserver is going to do is handle these clicks I would 
>> still bet on a lightweight perl http listener with all the click 
>> handling code build into it.

I think what I was trying to get at was that the best way to do this 
would be to have the click tracking engine (that actually gets told by 
the browser "i have visted page x") completely outside the webserver 
serving the site.

Client site www.foo.com can be served by any webserver / technology I 
want to. To use your tracking engine all I have to do is put a piece of 
html in my pages that requests an image of track.foo.com/image-CLIENTID.gif.

track.foo.com is a simple http server which I'd probably base on 
something like Net::Server::PreFork and put in the bits of HTTP that I 
need to get the cookie, the referrer and the client id. It then stores 
these in the database or flat file and returns a 1px x 1px gif which can 
be set to not even display on most browsers by setting width and height 
to 0.

There are a load of advantages to doing this, it's easily extensible, 
about as fast as you could make it without much effort, it's easily 
configurable and also you could compile it into an executeable to run on 
any platform, oh and the whole thing is written in perl. :-)

Paul.