Alternative Webservers and

[Peter Schober]

* McDermott, Michael <michael_mcdermott at brown.edu> [2012-01-05 14:26]:
> Attendant to that point, I saw this post this morning:
> http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-servers/nginx-overtakes-microsoft-no-2-web-server-183079
> 
> The headline is a bit sensational when you look at the statistics, but I
> take the point that the market share for a third, high performance web
> server, is growing to a level where it is probably mainstream.

I would also assume that these stats are likely to be skewed where
Nginx is only used as a proxy/for static content (which is unlikely to
be detected by Netcraft et al.).

Ignoring the full "polyglot/poly-server" generality of your question
fo the moment, it seems Nginx specifically could make use of the Shib
SP if $someone contributed code for a "FastCGI authorizer", cf.
https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/NativeSPFastCGIConfig
Someone with a real interest in Nginx could throw $$$ or manpower at it.

Or maybe http://www.lighttpd.net/ is light enough for you -- another
"third, high performance web server".

But that's still not what developers want, I'm sure, but no way we're
putting something to productive use based on one of the embedded
(toy?) webservers that come with Python, Ruby, etc.

Yet another route (as you mention) is to use SimpleSAMLphp for PHP,
pysaml2 for Python, ruby-saml for Ruby, etc., and tie your
applications to those APIs, their upgrade cycles and refactorings
(not to mention severly limited feature sets, in most cases).
-peter