Extending the Nagios CGIs - Discouraging Casual Commiters

While working on my Nagios display tools I wanted to modify our existing Nagios deployments to easily link the information in but after a quick dig I discovered that something was very wrong - the Nagios CGIs are written in C.

While shell and perl are my current languages of choice I can write (a very little and very basic) C but the idea of customising webpages in it, especially pages this critical to the company, stopped me in my tracks. While I can understand using the language you’re most familiar with when writing software if you want to attract contributers you need to match the language to the task. If the Nagios front ends had been written in any of the dynamic languages I’d have spent some time to understand and hopefully add to them - but not C, it’s the wrong level of language for this kind of work.