[Xitami] Overhead of GSL vs JSP vs CGI vs SSI?

[Francis Turner]

This is particularly directed at the imatix people on the list

I am in the process of developing something where I have some 
semi-dynamic content and I'm wondering what is the best way to handle it.

Essentially the pages I wish my users to see have static decorative bits 
(layout stylesheets etc) common to all pages, a part which is created 
once and then stored and some other bits which may change on a daily 
basis. As I see it there are three number of ways to combine the static, 
semi-static and dynamic bits into one page and I wonder which is the 
best for a Xitami server?

As I see it these are my choices:
Firstly I can serve up the pages using an external CGI app
Secondly I can use GSL to combine various XML pages and static content
Thirdly I can use SSI.
Fourthly I can use LRWP and the Sokrates JSP stuff

SSI is probably the least flexible because I have to keep the formatting 
of the original page and there may be cases where I wish to redisplay 
the data a different way. On the other hand xitami's CGI handling is not 
exactly its best part so I'm leaning away from a pure CGI version as we 
move to production. I'm interested in JSP but Java in general is not the 
worlds best performer so that option is also not that promising. Finally 
therefore there is the GSL option where I can use an interpreted script 
to combine things.

It seems to me that GSL and SSI are implemented in a similar fashion by 
Xitami and thus - assuming the script is fairly clean and tidy - GSL 
should perform almost as well as SSI but allow for a lot more 
flexibility? Is this the case? and is this going to be faster than a 
(compiled) external CGI program? I think it should be because as I 
uderstand it the server does not have to load XIXSSI and XIXXML whereas 
it does have to load the external CGI app, but I'd appreciate 
confirmation. Also given that the required actions are pretty straight 
forward am I wrong to fear the JSP alternative? When I run the JSP it 
seems to take up a lot of memory compared to xitami (but thats Java for 
you) but is it goign to be slower too? It seems to be a lot more complex 
but maybe it isn't? Also I now that Xitami's SSI has a bug in terms of 
the maximum page size it will deliver, does GSL suffer from the same 
problem? The external GSLGEN.exe doesn't seem to.

Any help or thoughts appreciated

Francis

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