[Dancer-users] A Dancer based web site for "every" PM group

[David Precious]

On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 21:41 +0200, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> here is an idea that might be interesting.
> 
> There are 250 or so PM groups.
> pm.org currently only offers static web hosting.
> If a PM group wants something more interesting
> they need to put it on another server.
> 
> What about setting up a server with Dancer and offering the pm
> groups access to upload the static part of the web site?
[...]
> This would drive the creation of a Dancer based
> content management system.
> 
> What do you think?

Interesting idea indeed, I like it on principle, but if it's basically
offering just static stuff, I don't see a big benefit.

Potentially more interesting would be to set up a nice secure box, and
let them run a fully dynamic Dancer-powered site, which would run under
their account with their privileges only, and have e.g. Nginx as the
front end proxying requests to it.

That way, they could do whatever they wanted with Dancer, and, assuming
the box is secure and permissions are set correctly, each group should
not be able to affect the others (maybe CPU/memory limits would be
useful, to catch any runaway code).

I think the biggest problem is finding time to set up and manage such a
service, and probable lack of demand from the start.  I'd imagine that,
in general, whoever controls the site of a PM group has the skills and
resources to set up their own site on their own server/VPS, but is
probably just lacking the time to do so.

It's entirely possible, however, that providing a quick & easy service
might entice them to do more (particularly if we extol the virtues of
Dancer's plugin ecosystem).

This actually hits on a more general idea I've had floating in the back
of my head for a while - a "turnkey" Dancer hosting service, where you'd
simply upload your app, and the service would satisfy pre-requirements
and fire up the app (probably using the aforementioned tactic of running
it as the user, with their privileges tightly managed.

Nginx could run and proxy requests to the app, and perhaps the app
itself could be opened up if they wanted to do so, so they could have
the option of keeping their domain/hostname pointing to their own server
running Nginx/Apache/whatever, and just proxy requests over to the app.

Such a thing could offer basic facilities free, and charge for higher
bandwidth/CPU usage, and extra spare worker threads, etc.


Cheers

Dave P

-- 
David Precious <davidp at preshweb.co.uk> ("bigpresh")
http://www.preshweb.co.uk/