This is a half-baked thought of mine so I thought I would post it in forum for discussion.

There are some things that ikiwiki.cgi is asked to do which do not involve changing the repository: these include form generation, handling logins, the "goto" from [[recentchanges]], edit previews, etc.

For one thing I am working on slowly ([[todo/interactive todo lists]]), I've hit a situation where I am likely to need to implement doing markup evaluation for a subset of a page. The problem I face is, if a user edits content in the browser, markup, ikiwiki directives etc. need to be expanded. I could possibly do this with a round-trip through edit preview, but that would be for the whole content of a page, and I hit the problem with editing a list item.

> (slight addendum on this front. I'm planning to split the javascript code for interactive todo lists into two parts: one for handling round trips of content to and from ikiwiki.cgi, and the various failure modes that might occur (permission denied, edit conflicts, login required, etc.) ; then the list-specific stuff can build on top of this. The first chunk might be reusable by others for other AJAXY-edit fu.)

Anyway - I've realised that a big part of the interactive todo lists stuff is trying to handle round trips to ikiwiki.cgi through javascript. A web services API would make handling the various conditions of this easier (e.g. need to login, login failed, etc.). I'm not sure what else might benefit from a web services API and I have no real experience of either using or writing them so I don't know what pros/cons there are for REST vs SOAP etc.

Second, and in a way related, I've been mooting hacking fastcgi support into ikiwiki. Essentially one ikiwiki.cgi process would persist and serve CGI-ish requests on stdin/stdout. The initial content-scanning and dependency generation would happen once and not need to be repeated for future requests. Although, all state-changing operations would need to be careful to ensure the in-memory models were accurate. Also, I don't know how suited the data structures would be for persistence, since the current model is build em up, throw em away, they might not be space-efficient enough for persistence.

If I did attempt this, I would want to avoid restructuring things in a way which would impair ikiwiki's core philosophy of being a static compiler. -- [[Jon]]
r'>tags</a>/<a href='/notmuch/commit/tags/02?h=master'>02</a>/<a href='/notmuch/commit/tags/02/98?h=master'>98</a>/<a href='/notmuch/commit/tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk?h=master'>149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk</a>/<a href='/notmuch/commit/tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk/jones?h=master'>jones</a></div><div class='content'><div class='cgit-panel'><b>diff options</b><form method='get'><input type='hidden' name='h' value='master'/><table><tr><td colspan='2'/></tr><tr><td class='label'>context:</td><td class='ctrl'><select name='context' onchange='this.form.submit();'><option value='1'>1</option><option value='2'>2</option><option value='3' selected='selected'>3</option><option value='4'>4</option><option value='5'>5</option><option value='6'>6</option><option value='7'>7</option><option value='8'>8</option><option value='9'>9</option><option value='10'>10</option><option value='15'>15</option><option value='20'>20</option><option value='25'>25</option><option value='30'>30</option><option value='35'>35</option><option value='40'>40</option></select></td></tr><tr><td class='label'>space:</td><td class='ctrl'><select name='ignorews' onchange='this.form.submit();'><option value='0' selected='selected'>include</option><option value='1'>ignore</option></select></td></tr><tr><td class='label'>mode:</td><td class='ctrl'><select name='dt' onchange='this.form.submit();'><option value='0' selected='selected'>unified</option><option value='1'>ssdiff</option><option value='2'>stat only</option></select></td></tr><tr><td/><td class='ctrl'><noscript><input type='submit' value='reload'/></noscript></td></tr></table></form></div><table summary='commit info' class='commit-info'>
<tr><th>author</th><td>Jonas Smedegaard &lt;dr@jones.dk&gt;</td><td class='right'>2023-06-27 09:35:08 +0200</td></tr>
<tr><th>committer</th><td>Jonas Smedegaard &lt;dr@jones.dk&gt;</td><td class='right'>2023-06-27 09:35:08 +0200</td></tr>
<tr><th>commit</th><td colspan='2' class='oid'><a href='/notmuch/commit/tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk/jones?h=master&amp;id=fd54908da2b05c526dd3bee9b6dcd093214a220d'>fd54908da2b05c526dd3bee9b6dcd093214a220d</a> (<a href='/notmuch/patch/tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk/jones?id=fd54908da2b05c526dd3bee9b6dcd093214a220d'>patch</a>)</td></tr>
<tr><th>tree</th><td colspan='2' class='oid'><a href='/notmuch/tree/?h=master'>c69c845069c99d1d01044f6fafda7c08433329c6</a> /<a href='/notmuch/tree/tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk/jones?h=master'>tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk/jones</a></td></tr>
<tr><th>parent</th><td colspan='2' class='oid'><a href='/notmuch/commit/tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk/jones?h=master&amp;id=ba46132213560cf3335d53560d519c0ec0190da2'>ba46132213560cf3335d53560d519c0ec0190da2</a> (<a href='/notmuch/diff/tags/02/98/149252954423.7651.14560765959761436242@auryn.jones.dk/jones?h=master&amp;id2=ba46132213560cf3335d53560d519c0ec0190da2'>diff</a>)</td></tr></table>
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