Is it acceptable to work around Apache's .htaccess nonsense in another language?

Question

I'm getting sick of all of Apache's quirks, and I'm considering starting to avoid .htaccess as much as I can in favor of writing actual, predictable code. It would be easy and straightforward to emulate things like file security and rewrites, and control precisely what is and isn't inherited between directories without having to use strange, obtuse directives. Would there be any downsides to this?

I'm talking about replacing, for example, this:

# .htaccess
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} blah
RewriteRule ^(.*)$        /test$1 [R=301,L]

with something like this:

# PHP, in a header file
if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'blah') !== false)
    redirect(301, '/test' . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

To repeat the question, what would be the downsides of implementing functionality in PHP which is traditionally handled by .htaccess?

Answer 1

Performance and scalability are the two primary reasons to use Apache to do the work as opposed to an app server (hosted PHP code, Java Servlets, Ruby on Rails, Asp.NET, etc.). Essentially Apache is very good at handling a large number of requests, and the 2.x versions use non-blocking I/O which means it can work with many many more requests than processes and threads in use. This is a good thing.

Hosted code usually makes some assumptions in an effort to make it easier to program, such as the code environment having full access to a thread. No matter how efficient your solution is, you won't be able to scale as gracefully unless your platform works the same way Apache server works.

Answer 2

I have written a framework for my own use that gets rid of all rewrites but one - rewrite (not redirect) everything to a single index.php. That index.php creates an instance of the framework controller and then tells it what paths exist in the site:

// Create paths for this site
$controller->addPath('/path', 'templatename, 'MyClass::someCodeToRun');

Of course there is more to it than that (mainly dynamic paths, nested templates, and security), but that's the basic idea.

This is what many frameworks do, and I really recommend it - it doesn't need to come at (much) of a performance price if your framework is lightweight and you only include what you need for each path. The only performance price is essentially the lookup table (which is just an associative array) for which path does what.

I think the better code organization can often end up being a performance win.

Answer 3

Performance, probably...

Also, the two behaviors you describe are not the same - a rewrite is not the same as a 301 redirect.