[ic] Interchange Install Question

JT Justman jt at signless.com
Sun Oct 28 13:15:17 EST 2007


rb wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
>     New user here.  Actually I haven't installed Interchange yet.  I'm
> curious to know why you need to install Interchange like the way you
> build Perl on the server.  Is there something written about this that I
> missed?
> 
>     At present, we're using another Perl cart, SurfShopPRO, and with
> that you just need to upload the Perl templates to use the cart.  Can
> someone explain why the install process for Interchange is so different?

Hi, Ron!

Interchange is different from a simple CGI-based shopping cart system in
that it runs as a 'server' or 'daemon'. This means that the Interchange
program runs on the server all the time alongside the web server daemon
(i.e., Apache). The main reason for this is so that each and every page
request doesn't result in loading all of the Interchange code and a new
instance of the Perl interpreter. It also allows Interchange to perform
some persistent optimizations.

When you access a simple CGI page, Apache invokes an instance of the
Perl interpreter to execute the script. When you access an Interchange
page, Apache will route the request (through CGI or mod_perl, etc) to an
Interchange child process, which is already primed up and ready to serve
the request.

I can't speak on the way SurfShopPRO might be written.

Interchange is also very fully featured and powerful. It has been
extended to the point that you could (and many do) use it for things far
beyond e-commerce.

-- 
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