[josephg]

Yep. Also, sharing resources between connections is (at best) very difficult using CGI, and its trivially easy using a stand-alone app server. You can just set up a global variable at process startup and you're done. (This is useful in just about every web app I've ever written - eg for the connection to a database, cached resources, cached renders of common pages, in-memory only security tokens, etc).

I also find the modern approach much easier to reason about and debug. I don't need Apache + fastCGI + php + php fastCGI + apache configuration to get started. I can just run `node server.js` and my web app works.

The fact that it also scales much better is a cherry on top.

[rakoo]

> Also, sharing resources between connections is (at best) very difficult using CGI, and its trivially easy using a stand-alone app server. You can just set up a global variable at process startup and you're done

You can pass environment variables to CGI scripts as well. In fact, that's exactly how CGI works. Shared resources can be cached in memory through redis, although a shared file (for example sqlite) is enough in many cases.

> I don't need Apache + fastCGI + php + php fastCGI + apache configuration to get started

I'm talking about CGI, not fastCGI

[josephg]

Environment variables can’t store a TCP connection to a database or a pre rendered HTML string.

In the latter case you could use redis, but that’s a poor, inconvenient, inefficient replacement for a global variable.

[rakoo]

Again, I'm not saying CGI is the fastest but that it is fast enough. Opening a new connection (or better yet, using SQLite), reading a file that contains a prerendered HTML string are fast enough for most use cases