FastCGi on IIS... The tale of Microsoft and my new Perl Module...

[Lyle - CosmicPerl.com]

Hi All,
 After my "Brown trousers" post I've been looking into FastCGI a lot. 
Seeing that it works with lots of different servers and not just Apache 
was very attractive (sorry mod_perl). Also one of the big things was 
seeing that Microsoft (as much as I dislike em) have embraced FastCGI 
and released their own library for IIS 5.1 and IIS6. Further more IIS7 
on Windows 2008 (I've been testing RC0) comes with their FastCGI library 
as standard. Wicked :)

Just one drawback, Microsoft has been working with Zend (yes the PHP 
guys) to release this FastCGI library, and they tell you exactly how it 
can work with PHP. They go on to say it'll work with other languages... 
but they don't really know how. Bummer. Looking through the forums I saw 
a guy "Andrew Sears" trying to get it working with Ruby on Rails, he 
also gave me a great deal of help, putting me on the right track when I 
posted about getting it working with Perl. The only other post about 
Perl and their FastCGI was a guy complaining that he wanted a guide...

So me decided to get it working miself...

Now I've released FCGI::IIS on CPAN, 3rd revision so far.

I've got it working on Windows 2003, and Windows 2008. Vista IIS7 is 
pending an update from Microsoft for me to be able to try it out.

It's working (mostly) for perl scripts that want to run a bit faster on 
IIS using FastCGI (no FastCGI code needed in the actual scripts, so this 
should work with almost any windows compatible perl script) I've not put 
together a guide for running your Perl FastCGI scripts in their own 
application pool... yet...

Either way, I'm quite chuffed with it. Looking at the code of the 
module, it looks like hardly anything, but figuring it all out and 
testing it has taken ages.

I'm interested in any feedback...


Lyle