When I published webhub @ href.com in 1995 we called these 'custom runners'. Looks like you'd have approved of that concept :)
OP, your site is unusable on mobile. I wasn’t able to read about your project as scrolling causes it to force half the text and diagrams out of frame.
Having first met Apache when Perl CGI scripts were bleeding edge fancy "web app" technology, I hoped to read a satirical article, but it's actually an earnest suggestion to go full circle.
It does less than proper CGI, due to giving up HTTP (particularly response headers, status codes and content types) in order to process constrained JSON, and it does it in a more complicated way (UI? Scheduler? Git repositories?), but it's still better than other options.
Nice idea, bring back the old Common Gateway Interface for web development.
I did something very similar for handling webhooks (but can also be used for anything else), check it out at https://github.com/adnanh/webhook
People have used it in various segments, from actual deployments on push, to home automation, someone even wrote a guide on how to control the Xiaomi Robot Vacuum using the Amazon Dash button :-)
Losing the ability to stream the request and response is a big downgrade from normal CGI. I'm struggling to see how this improves at all on it.
Isn't this just OpenFaaS?
OpenFaaS has a single-binary distributable that doesn't require Docker/k8s they released called faasd:
> I also tried self-hosted solutions based on k3s but it too heavy for 1GB server (yep, it is, don’t believe in marketing).
ow.
inetd was like what, eBPF hacks and sidecars?
Is this compatible with AWS Lambdas on some level? Could it be? What about FastCGI/WSGI/... compatibility? I'm thinking it could be really nice for hobby projects and for developing on a laptop.
We have gone full circle c:
a) This site is very hard to navigate; on mobile the text jumps around whenever you touch and it's usually cut off past the edge of the screen
b) I couldn't figure out what this is. At first I thought it was computer graphics rendering (what "CGI" usually means), but after skimming several paragraphs I don't think that's what it is? But I'm still not sure.
c) Clicking the github link tries to download a .zip, which beyond making it harder to figure out what this is, was mildly distressing.
Edit: re: the downvotes, presumably the author would want to know that their site is broken on mobile and that the content is inaccessible to the average reader who might be curious to learn about it, in ways that could be easily remedied.
nginx unit (https://unit.nginx.org/configuration/#process-management) does something very similar. with `spare = 0` config option it will start app process lazily and shutdown when idle.
There is support for Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Node, Go runtimes.