Go Static or Go Home

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2721993

by fiber • 12 years ago

123 102 12 years ago

queue.acm.org

__Joker• 12 years ago

Interesting. Also if you are interested read http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/206558/why-do...

microtonal• 12 years ago

Did you read the article? It's about static vs. dynamic site generation. It mentions eval() in a passing, but it's not about dynamic vs. static typing.

bikamonki3• 12 years ago

I've been an evangelist of static sites for a while. With over 15 yrs of experience doing sites I started in static and saw the "dynamic movement" born and grow (at some point I even programmed my own DCMS!); in most cases the motivation to install a DCMS was that the client wanted to update content in-house instead of paying a webmaster (a sound business idea?) but the reality is that even when using a dead simple DCMS clients always find it difficult to run it and still contact the webmaster. Furthermore, the vast majority of sites are seldom or never updated so having the 'kick me' sign in those cases is nosense. I guess a strong selling point of DCMS that made us all buy in even knowing that it was a bad idea where themes and plugins! So many of them, so nice looking, cross-browser tested and so easy to install. Clients where über happy with the end product.

So a couple of years ago I decided to do static sites for ALL my clients (there may be dynamic components that I normally implement with a back-end data service). I still have a few dozen sites and web apps with DCMS but the goal is to migrate them as well.

icebraining2• 12 years ago

The best mix may be a (hosted) dynamic editor that generates and deploys the static site. Have you considered this solution? It probably won't eliminate the need for a webmaster, but it should help reduce the requests for small changes while keeping the benefits of the static site.

burke• 12 years ago

I think I tried a blog engine once that did this. Maybe it was https://movabletype.org/ ? In any case, I really wish more people/tools employed this strategy.

jeffreyrogers• 12 years ago

I agree, this way seems the best. The reason people like WordPress so much is because it abstracts away everything except writing content. Users don't care how the site is served (and most nontechnical users won't even know).

bikamonki3• 12 years ago

Yes I agree, that is what I use now, in fact I have an additional layer: the static CMS generates JSON that in turn is fed to an front end MVC to render the pages. Assets are uploaded to AWS so I can use/reuse them. I am also serving sites directly from AWS S3 so there is no server to deal with at all. Everything dynamic can be done with SAAS/PAAS (comments, email, form collection, etc). Any static CMS that you recommend? I am using a (very limited) house blend for now, I call it Statico ;)

icanblogshitz• 12 years ago

There was a submission briefly on the front page here where someone was proclaiming security by not using c/c++ for projects, yet, they left their blog comments and site wide open for some idiots who have already tried to post silly comments with JS popups.

I guess maybe we need people to use static sites, like trainer wheels on bikes, until they become more security concious.

chriswarbo3• 12 years ago

Security is additive: the more precautions you take, the more secure you'll be. Avoiding C/C++ when safer, higher-level languages could be used is one example. Escaping Web site comments is another. Doing both is best, but either on its own is still better than neither.

Becoming "security concious"[sic] doesn't mean outgrowing best practices. If Bruce Schneier used "password" as his password, he wouldn't avoid getting attacked just because he knew it was a bad practice. Likewise, understanding the tradeoffs between static and dynamic Web sites doesn't make someone's dynamic site secure.

As the article points out, even a locked-down, well-tuned dynamic site with CAPTCHA-protected registration forms is orders of magnitude easier to bring down with DDoS attacks, since dynamic sites must perform more work per request, eg. to render "Hello CaptchaFarmUser99999" at the top of the page. If they don't need to perform more work per request, since all pages are always fully cached, then you've just re-invented static sites :)

buro9• 12 years ago

I'd love to see how different people solve the highly dynamic plus static problem.

This usually boils down to the shopping cart and checkout example... you can always attack the checkout process as it is a unique, dynamic part of the process that no web store wishes to ever be unavailable.

How does one "go static" with web applications that by necessity involve interactions with datastores?

Arcanum-XIII• 12 years ago

The idea is not that everything need to be static - some contents are by nature updated too fast, or too often, to be static. Still, there's lot of page that could be pre generated since the content of the datastore itself is not evolving a lot. Most blog could use a static blog generator for example, with the comment being the only dynamic part - and a lot of cms page too ! Pre baking stuff is so much easier, faster, and cleaner.

chriswarbo3• 12 years ago

True. My personal site is static (generated with Hakyll), and uses Disqus for comments (only because I haven't yet seen a simple, self-hosted alternative which has been battle-tested).

chriswarbo3• 12 years ago

Many dynamic things can be accomplished client-side these days. I see no problem with that, as long as it degrades gracefully to some default fallback.

In other cases, it's probably best to have each stateful system as an isolated component. For example, having a dynamic checkout doesn't require the news section to be dynamic. In fact, if you can isolate components like your checkout, you may be able to have someone else manage it for you. For example, at a previous job we used FoxyCart to deal with online checkouts; we just embedded specially-crafted URLs into our pages (although those pages were still running in Drupal!).

netaustin• 12 years ago

High traffic and high volume sites driven by CMSes, like newspapers, tv stations, etc., largely cannot rely on static files to deliver their content. Rather, they use caching layers for speed and security. There are two better ways to improve security for sites like these, which are highly targeted and poor candidates for static sites:

1) Use a headless CMS. WordPress on the backend that provides and API which is consumed by a Node app, for example.

2) Shift any user-facing dynamic feature off the CMS. Commenting, login, subscription management, etc., can be handled by purpose-built apps that tie into the CMS-driven site via Javascript, preserving the security and cacheability of the CMS.

That's not to say that it's impossible to drive a large-scale news site with static files. I believe CNN does exactly that with their in-house CMS. But no open-source CMS that generates static files is powerful enough to use in a newsroom context, or popular enough to gain traction.

semperfaux• 12 years ago

Nice to see your input here, and relevant. Granted, it's no Wonderfile, but then what is? ;)

jamiesonbecker2• 12 years ago

It's simply a matter of inversion. Is the page generation and publication performed upon each change (by editors/authors/etc) or upon each access? Obviously, the former is much more efficient, even for frequent changes, and even across millions of data points. (Just ask Twitter).

Just because we don't really have common, enterprise-grade authoring tools for non-technical people that publish static sites anymore doesn't mean that it's not the better way.

Retric• 12 years ago

Sure we do, it's called caching.

There is a minimal difference between a webserver serving static pages and a caching server serving static content. When you get down to it caching is simply a more flexable approach to the classic (autoring tool) -> static webpage approach. In many ways the only difference is the authoring tool is a website not a stand alone program.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

News is about as static as it gets.

andrewstuart22• 12 years ago

A castle with no gate is also more secure. And kind of useless for its inhabitants. Like being under siege all the time.

My point being, sure you can get a more secure `something` by making it more and more static, but you'll probably cripple it somehow.

It's simply a balance you have to find for your use case.

rimantas• 12 years ago

OTOH I'd say currently balance is heavily skewed to needless dynamism. You cannot get some trivial page without JS enabled and god only knows what's going on on the server.

jkot2• 12 years ago

There are castles with no gates.

I think problem is that current dynamic websites are sort of crippled already. Right now even simple shopping app requires UI based on HTML + web. Not a chance to use command line, some automated devices etc... In future we might see radically simplified protocols/webservices for more universal access.

Diederich2• 12 years ago

I hear what you're saying, but it doesn't have to be so.

All of the web apps I make at work are all javascript in a page apps. But before I start doing any of that, I make a REST API. 100% of the interaction between javascript and the web server is REST.

There are many reasons for this, but a key one is that it allows easy command-line or programatic interaction. Much easier than with traditional, server generated web apps.

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

There are castles with no gates.

Like, real castles?

normloman3• 12 years ago

I'm not concerned if a web app or a shopping cart is dynamic. But I see dynamic blogs all the time. Blogs with no comment system, or one that's used infrequently. What's the point of making that dynamic?

While I'm on the subject, can anyone tell me the reasoning behind loading blog content with javascript? I hate when I visit a blog with no script turn on, and get greeted by a blank template. Why does it need javascript to grab the page content?

andrewstuart22• 12 years ago

One word: caching.

The more resources you can cache fully (like the template) the fewer round trips you need to make and/or the shorter those round trips become. It's always the latency that slows us down (by definition), which is why even modern processors have sophisticated cache layers and branch prediction. The further from the CPU the resource is, the slower the interaction will be.

This debate is interesting and a bit funny to me because it's very similar to the old dumb terminal vs personal computer debate. We've swung back to the mainframe, except now it's distributed and we call it the cloud.

My prediction (take it or leave it) is that we'll soon be swung all the way back to dynamic client-side sites. And then eventually back to the quantum cloud (heh, "Electron Cloud"). Or something new and more powerful than whatever sits in our pocket or on our desk.

normloman3• 12 years ago

Thanks for answering my question. Would you mind clarifying it for me?

If your blog has a reusable template, wouldn't the images, fonts, and stylesheets that are part of the template get cached on the user's computer, regardless of whether it was dynamic or static?

Or are you talking about caching things serverside?

jordanlev2• 12 years ago

The point of making a blog dynamic is so a non-technical user can easily manage the content via a dashboard. I'm a big fan of static site generators (which is what I presume you're inferring people should use for blogs instead of wordpress et al), but it is silly to think that uploading markdown files to a server is a reasonable workflow for most non-programmers.

As for loading content with javascript -- I totally agree, this bugs the shit out of me. Also, I browse with cookies disabled by default and it is always frustrating when a site that is only serving content doesn't load properly without cookies. wtf?!

normloman3• 12 years ago

I'm not advocating static page generators that use markdown. Far from it. I used to use a blog platform called Movable Type. It was just as easy to use as WordPress but it generated static pages. You'd make changes in the back end, click publish, and Movable Type would generate a new static page to serve up.

You can make WordPress generate static pages too. They have plugins for that.

k__• 12 years ago

Also, in times of SPAs, LocalStorage, WebRTC, Parse and FireBase you can sprinkle your static web-sites with some dynamic functionality, when needed...

gizzlon5• 12 years ago

Ok, I understand that there's reasons for using static pages, but I don't get the feeling this guy really understands what he's talking about.

Even if [..] and there's nothing like bash installed on the same computer as the web server

Bash installed? Huh? Why Bash exactly? I feel mentioning jails or containers here would be more on point..

This is because every DCMS page view involves running a few tiny bits of software on your web server, rather than just returning the contents of some files that were generated earlier.

Sure, but guess how those pages are returned? By running code on the server..

It seems like hes real beef is with "dynamic" (vs staic) sites, but he keeps mentioning CMS's for some reasons (ike you can't can have "dynamic" sites witjout a cms)

The web server executes no code on behalf of a viewer until that viewer has logged in..

1) Of course it does, 2) How do the site check your info without executing code? :)

etc etc..

There's a case for static sites, but this post just confuses things.

anth1y• 12 years ago

Ok, I understand that there's reasons for using static pages, but I don't get the feeling this guy really understands what he's talking about.

I think he might know a little bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Vixie

mordocai• 12 years ago

None of the things on that wikipedia page makes me think he actually knows anything about web servers. Sure, he obviously should know about some of the things that make the internet work (BIND, cron, etc) but nothing on there has anything to do with making web sites. All of it is about the infrastructure.

Either this article is filled with intentional hyperbole, or this guy doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to serving web pages.

mcguire• 12 years ago

Which is what makes the article so peculiar. He's either being exceptionally sloppy or...I don't know what the other options are.

gizzlon5• 12 years ago

Founder of ISC? Impressive! (But it doesn't make the article any better :)

bnegreve5• 12 years ago

On the other hand, I don't really get your point.

Sure, but guess how those pages are returned? By running code on the server..

Yes, but by running static code.

> The web server executes no code on behalf of a viewer until that viewer has logged in.. 1) Of course it does, 2) How do the site check your info without executing code? :)

Again, static code.

So his point is not that we shouldn't run code at all, but that we shouldn't run code that heavily processes user inputs, or worse, evaluate generated code as DCMSs sometimes do.

Of course you can argue the no code is truly static, because it depends on the user input, but I don't think this is what you're arguing here.

betenoire2• 12 years ago

of course you can argue [that] no code is truly static

what the hell is static code? Static has very specific meanings in different technical contexts (static pages, static allocation, static scoping, etc), but I've never heard someone refer to static code.

Can you give me an example of code that is and isn't static by your definition?

smhenderson2• 12 years ago

Bash installed? Huh? Why Bash exactly? I feel mentioning jails or containers here would be more on point.

Maybe because of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_%28software_bug%29

gizzlon5• 12 years ago

Maybe, but doesn't that require that the attacker can set ENV variables for the executed bash command? I'm sure it happens, but it seems unlikely to be a major concern for most dynamic sites?

(I'm not arguing against the notion that static sites can be more secure, just that the article is bad ;)

StefanKarpinski3• 12 years ago

"Little Johnny Tables". Um, yes, that was "Little Bobby Tables" [1]. Obviously not a big deal, but it seems emblematic of how sloppy this piece is. The article confuses – seemingly willfully, since Paul Vixie should know better – the concepts of dynamic language, dynamic page generation, lack of proper input hygiene, and various other orthogonal issues. The argument that dynamic languages are less secure depends an awful lot on the language – I don't think anyone is going to buy that C is more secure than Python. Haskell vs Python? Now that's a debate to be had. Certainly, websites that do no dynamic content generation are probably more secure – but then you're stuck with the Internet circa 1993. And of course, nobody is in favor not sanitizing inputs properly.

[1] http://xkcd.com/327/

feld3• 12 years ago

Go outside and get some fresh air.

tptacek7• 12 years ago

I generally like your comments and this one is out place for you. What were you actually trying to say?

codygman• 12 years ago

Haskell vs Python (more secure)

If you mean comparing type systems there isn't much of a debate!

StefanKarpinski3• 12 years ago

I was talking about which is more secure. The real point is that this isn't a static vs. dynamic language issue: C and C++ are static and full of terrifying security traps; Haskell is static and it isn't. Since C and C++ are the most commonly used static languages, and they are much less secure than the most commonly used dynamic languages, it's questionable to claim – without additional elaboration – that static is more secure than dynamic.

yk2• 12 years ago

Calling any Turing complete language "more secure" is probably nonsense. It is possible to write secure applications in C, and it is possible to directly pipe attacker controlled input to a shell in Haskell.

StefanKarpinski3• 12 years ago

Sure, you can do dangerous stuff in any language, but it's much harder to write a secure C program than a secure Python or Haskell program.

tptacek7• 12 years ago

I know a total of zero working security researchers who think C is just as safe as Scala.

The obvious flaw in your example: you can exec a program unsafely in both C and in Scala, but only in C can you do it accidentally simply by idiomatically copying a string from one place to another.

wglb3• 12 years ago

It is possible to write secure applications in C

Yes, but is it probable? History says no.

jerf• 12 years ago

"Calling any Turing complete language "more secure" is probably nonsense."

I just wrote an article on a sensible metric by which you can do exactly that: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2942

A lot of people already knew that stuff on one level or another anyhow, but it's helpful to spell it out sometimes and bring subconscious feelings up to the conscious level.

bnegreve5• 12 years ago

The article confuses [...] the concepts of dynamic language, dynamic page generation, lack of proper input hygiene, and various other orthogonal issues.

One of the implicit point of the article (that maybe shouldn't be implicit) is that these issues are not, in fact, orthogonal.

For example this:

Most of the computer languages used to write web applications such as DCMS systems contain a feature called eval, where programming instructions can be deliberately promoted from data to code at runtime.

In other words, proper input hygiene is a problem because you're dealing with a language that allows execution of data (i.e. a dynamic language).

erikb• 12 years ago

And there we have it. Security needs stability, stability decreases on a daily basis. We can't have that traditional kind of security. We need to move on to a more proactive way of thinking.

qeorge3• 12 years ago

Startup idea, free for the taking: create a service that "ossifies" dynamic websites into static HTML.

(By ossify, I mean to take something dynamic and make it static).

For example, that WordPress site you commissioned for a movie 3 years ago? Its a huge liability, but you don't have to take it offline - just ossify it. No one is updating that blog anymore!

Under the hood, it would basically be a crawler, and the deliverable would be a zip file containing a 1-to-1, static copy of their website with all URLs still working. I suspect most folks here could whip up a shitty proof of concept in 48 hours.

If someone does this, email me! I have a couple of potential clients for you (I'm a former consultant, with lots of WordPress sites in my history).

j_baker• 12 years ago

That's basically what the wayback machine does: https://archive.org/web/

qeorge3• 12 years ago

Yes! It would be like the Wayback machine as a service, but with some key differences:

1) The intention is that you replace your dynamic site with the static copy, but your visitors are none the wiser. All URLs are the same, as well as the content returned. Might require some .htaccess trickery.

2) It would have to preserve all the images, css, and other assets, some possibly hotlinked. (The Wayback Machine is not awesome at this, understandably)

voyou• 12 years ago

You can get pretty close to this, I think with:

    wget --mirror --convert-links http://site.example.com/

From the wget manual:

    --convert-links
           After the download is complete, convert the links in the document
           to make them suitable for local viewing.  This affects not only the
           visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to
           external content, such as embedded images, links to style sheets,
           hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.

           The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will be
           changed to refer to the file they point to as a relative link.

           Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to
           /bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in doc.html will
           be modified to point to ../bar/img.gif.  This kind of
           transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of
           directories.

juliangregorian3• 12 years ago

This is already a product that exists many times over. Besides the aforementioned wget, I've recommended less technical users to SiteSucker, a Mac/iOS app.

I'd be happy to bill your clients to do it for them though!

qeorge3• 12 years ago

Here's the thing: they don't want to run SiteSucker. That's only slightly more helpful than telling them to just run wget!

They want to write a check and get back to business, not become a web developer!

(I think that tool is awesome though, and I appreciate the tip!)

faraazin• 12 years ago

Noob qn:how does custom search work on static sites? May not be the best approach, but a simple SQL query would do the trick for dynamic sites.

juliangregorian3• 12 years ago

A simple SQL query is not a great solution even for dynamic sites that pull content from SQL databases. You have to protect against SQL injection and you usually will want fulltext indices for all the text fields to be searched. It's also going to be slow in the naive implementation for databases of any significant size.

The better solution for both dynamic and static sites is to set up a search appliance like elasticsearch, solr, or algolia. You can use JS to query it and still be static on the server.

If you do set up your own, remember to use a reverse proxy like nginx to avoid exposing elasticsearch directly to the internet.

kstrauser• 12 years ago

I used Google Site Search (https://www.google.com/work/search/products/gss.html), which starts at $100 per year. Outsource all that infrastructure to a company who's good at it, park your static HTML on a CDN, and enjoy fast worldwide access with searchable content.

That's not the only option, but it's a boss-friendly company to name drop. Most organizations wouldn't blink at the price, especially if it means you can move off dynamic hosting to far cheaper static hosting.

ivanhoe• 12 years ago

Static site is more secure only if the server is also up-to-date and setup properly to trim down all unnecessary options. Putting static site on a general purpose apache installation that will happily serve PHP and CGIs from user home dirs is not such a big security improvement.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

I'm going to say that the bigger problem in dynamic languages isn't that they are dynamic. It's that they have weak, nonexistant, or very undeveloped mechanisms for creating strong communication protocols that you can depend on as safe or reliable.

Take the classic case of SQL injection. You have string input into your system that turns into string input into a SQL query that turns into string input to a database. That is dangerous because if you don't check on what the input string contains, it might contain nothing, or a semicolon, or it might not be a string at all!

We understand that putting a string direct into a SQL statement is dangerous at this point, but we have yet to fix its root cause - nonexistant protocols or boundaries in most code we write.

What a static language changes in that regard is compiler checked type signatures on your code. That generally stops you from say passing an Integer into something that needs a String. That solves a certain class of problems for sure, and the complier does it for you every time you change your code, so there is a convenience there.

What static typing doesn't give you is actual data correctness. Things like buffer overflows or SQL injection can still happen with static typing. You could use a language like Scala or Haskell to have stronger/more complex types that would have more distinct notion of value correctness and at that point the complier would be doing most of the work to ensure your program is correct.

Leaning on a type system in that regard is basically turning your types into the protocols that determine correctness in your system.

It is also possible to lean on stronger protocols that check messages in a dynamic languages to achieve largely the same thing.

In the end, to write safe, high quality software, you need to define the communication protocols between methods/functions/routines/services and enforce them much as you would with an externally facing REST api.

The difference between a dynamic system with dynamic protocol checking vs a static system with compiler type checking is the mechanism you are using to enforce the protocol and how easy it is to interact with it.

Dynamic systems might be easier to interface with externally because you don't have to understand a complex type, just pass a Hash/Dictionary sort of like a JSON API, vs a static system where you need to use the right types and so on, similar to a SOAP/WSDL API.

Performance is also a consideration, but really when you compare static vs dynamic, it is important to understand that at the end of the day you can write Ruby/Python/PHP that is functionally equivalent to C/C++/Java. They are all ultimately going to be able to do the same kinds of things.

The tradeoff is in how they solve the problem and how well that fits with the team writing the software.

Go Static or Go Home

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