First of all... how does syper was born?
It all started when i had to implement ZeroMQ at work.
When i finished implementing it, our program ran flawlessly, cummunication between services and nodes were very easy to implement. It was implemented in a Client/Server environment (a really big Desktop Application).
But i also do Web Development. And somehow i asked myself... Is there any web server that delegates it's requests to 0mq nodes? and Google told me: Yes, there is one... It's name was Mongrel2.
Mongrel2 is a web server that focus on delegating the requests to 0mq sockets. Plain and simple. I said "i'll use that", but oh wait, big problem... I need it for Windows, because, you know, the market in which i move is on Windows, so, yeah, that was pretty sad that Mongrel2 wasn't available on windows.
So i told myself "how difficult could it be to build one web server like Mongrel2?"... I was crazy, and give it a tought for several weeks.
I researched on free time. And research and research. Then somehow i thinked about FastCGI, and started reading it's documentation.
And then an idea came up. Why should i focus on what lot's of web servers already do? So i build Syper.
Syper is a very simple dynamic linked library that uses ZeroMQ and FastCGI.
It's simple, it waits for Requests from Apache, nginx, IIS 7, or any other FastCGI enabled web server, and then it passes that request to a ZeroMQ node. When the ZeroMQ node responds, it passes the response back to the FastCGI enabled web server.
Plan and simple.
No, and it will never be. I belive Mongrel2 has better architecture... Talking about technicisms, Mongrel2 uses PUSH and SUB 0mq sockets, and Syper uses the ultimate DEALER/ROUTER combo, which has it's downsides but it's very easy to maintain, anyone can understand it.
Also, Mongrel2 supports some kind of longpolling. Syper doesn't. Why? because Syper don't have complete control over the web server, and Mongrel2 does. Yeah it could be implemented on Syper, but it could be very "hacky" and it may make things more difficult (for example i would need to change from DEALER/ROUTER to PUSH/SUB as Mongrel2 does, and that's not all, lots of challenges arises).
You can use it to develop Web Applications using virtually any programming language that supports calling plain C functions on a DLL or SO file, or any language that can talk 0mq.
Maybe your language of choice is already available for Web Development, and you don't need Syper.
I build Syper to use WinDev to develop Web Applications.
Ok, i've been using WebDev since version 11. And I DON'T LIKE IT. And also, it's expensive to deploy an application because of the licensing fee.
I develop the projects using it, but, i just don't like it.
But what i do like, is the easy data access modules that WinDev provides for Desktop applications. It's not the fastest language of the world, but the tools it provides for data access are great.
And data access is a big part of web development. So, how can i do web development using only WinDev? the answer now is Syper.
And also it's a very simple language, we don't have problems recruiting people with zero experience using it to start using it and be productive.
The current version is only for Windows (XP SP 3 and up).
The Syper C++ DLL can be compiled on Linux and OSX with very little changes. Actually i started it on OSX and tested it a lot using Xcode profiling tools, and Apache Benchmarks to make sure it isn't leaking memory and CPU usage was acceptable. Then i moved it to Visual Studio (i hate Visual Studio, that's why i started on Xcode) and made a few changes to make it work on Windows.
Right now WinDev runs on Linux and Windows. So, i'll provide Makefiles as soon as the Linux version is working in the near future. I want to host a WinDev application using Syper, maybe just a pet project just to make sure Syper is working well.
Sorry, the only documentation hint i can give you, is this:
Look at the syper.h file.
It should be very straightforward.
(The MIT License)
Copyright (c) 2014 Hilario Pérez Corona <hpcorona@gmail.com>
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