Re: New feature: visit counters

[Davi Leal]

Dion Rasmussen wrote:
> > I suppose it would be better to use the data base which we are already
> > using to keep all the information. So we can expand it easily.
>
> Aren't you/we already storing each job offer as a file in some unix-like
> security context, if that's the case we might better "stick" with each
> filename?!

No, we are not storing each offer as a file. The steps are as follows:

  1. Get the offer information from the data base.
  2. Apply a HTML template to it.
  3. Translate it to some of the webapp supported languages:
     Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Russian, ...
  4. Show the final information to the webapp user.

The project is not using static HTML files but dynamic output from the PHP 
scripts.


> > But, what would be the http.conf configuration to keep the visit counter
> > on a URL?
>
> like this:
>
>       <Location ~REGEX>
>          PerlFixupHandler Counter::Module
>       </Location>
>
> and done from the locations matching REGEX or using normal Directory
> directives or even specified in .htaccess files...

IMHO, as we are not using static HTML files we can not apply such 
visit-counter design.


> > Database is said to be a better solution for a multi-user scenario. The
> > read/write locking is solved by the database layer, so you do not have to
> > worry about it. Developing the locking support by hand would be a lot of
> > lots of work!
>
> Not anymore work than specifying a database transaction which is the
> same...

Good database engines are complex. IMHO we should not develop our own data 
base engine to develop our own read/write locking and multi-user support 
algorithms.

There are already several free software database engines out there which we 
can use.  Using PostgreSQL is a good option.


> > Non using .htaccess is more fast than using it.
> > It is not needed to use .htaccess
>
> Anyways for the sake of access specifications, .htaccess is usually more
> convenient than using some script.

We are using the PHPSESSID cookie to check permission per user. We do not 
check permission per file, we check it per user.