Well,
I am reacting to the salt on the open wound and giving my
opinion.
1. Aolserver does what is supposed to do (i.e. a webserver with TCL
support) and does it well.
2. When people are now talking about things like node.js, Inria
hop, Google GWT this is not going back to provide some JS (or PHP)
support; here the idea is to have a single paradigm, a single programming
model client-side and server-side and this is rather new. Even if we added
these things, people would not leave their preferred mainstream platform,
just to switch to Aolserver. And where would be the energy to implement all
of this stuff?
3. I believe, I might be wrong, that lots of people are not really
interested in Aolserver per se, they are interested in having the full
software stack: Aolserver + TCL + PostgreSQL + OpenACS working and working
well together.
4. So what I would do is:
a. Aolserver - Make it stable versus nowadays available OSes( eg. add
the IPV6, if necessary, remove any 32 bit things if they are still there,
both in the Unix part and in the Windows part, and so on
),
b. OpenACS update the data model so that instead of hierarchical
structures CTEs are used (this would allow OpenACS to work properly on
current versions on PostgreSQL, and Oracle too )
c. OpenACS Improve the user interfaces, with a particular eye to
mobile platforms (yes here a lot of JS will be required but it is not the
same thing as node.js, this is more the traditional JS)
d. Applications (that is the most difficult part) they should change
their code base to use these new features (e.g. CTE versus hierarchical
structures).
I am aware that I somehow trespassed the Aolserver only borders and I do
apologize for that, but I believe we cannot speak about Aolserver alone, nor
about OpenACS alone and so on
All the components stack must converge
towards the same future.
Again sorry for the mumbo jumbo.
Ciao,
Maurizio
From: Jim Davidson [mailto:jgdavid...@mac.com]
Sent: 28 September 2012 21:14
To: Jeff Rogers
Cc: aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [AOLSERVER] Suggestions for a future aolserver
Howdy,
The Digital City extensions were written way back in 1998 :) I wrote a big
chunk of the code along with Jay Ridgeway, Nate Folkman, Shaz Chaudhri and
others. We used it extensively for sites like Aol.com <http://aol.com/> ,
MapQuest, Moviefone, etc. It had a bunch of goodies, many pragmatic
solutions to large-scale, multi-server installations. One popular item was
"sob" which pre-dates and was similar in use to memcache but, assuming well
cacheable objects, far faster because it utilized AolServer's large
shared-memory model and persistent control connections for a a coherent,
multi-server cache. I like to say that today's memcache "hit" was our
sob-based cache "miss". It was typical for an nsdci-based AolServer to make
dozens or 100's of nssob calls building a single page within a few 100
milliseconds. There were some other interesting pieces like "av" which was
a pre-sorted key-value pair file that would be distributed out to the
servers (could be 100 servers or more) and memmapped in "instantly". This
was the basis for a huge chunk of pre-computed published content, e.g.,
promotion indices and such. I don't think any of it is still in use at Aol
today -- for various reasons new technologies are now used but I haven't
heard that anything new approached the same level of efficiency and
performance.
The downside to that stuff was topology management -- with 100 or more
connected servers for Aol.com <http://aol.com/> , for example, managing the
Tcl-based config files went from something clever or at least curious to
despised. Some of the over-reliance on pre-computation of data structures
in the interest of ultimate run-time performance also began to wear on the
patience of editors who had to use increasingly over burdened back-office
publishing systems (Aolserver based as well).
So, all things in moderation, everything has it's day in the sun :)
Having said that, the nsdci module is very cool if a bit undocumented and
arcane on the config side. Oh, and that av thing? It's not 64-bit safe --
the offsets and lengths as 32-bit integers in the on-disk file were swapped
to direct pointers on load. Didn't seem like a problem back in 1999....
Anyway, from what I've heard about node.js (which was just a guy giving a
talk about it at a conference), it sounds very cool. I think getting
javascript and/or php to run well with Aolserver would be interesting. Tcl
would always have a special place and any implementation would need a "call
Tcl..." thinger, but sounds like a cool investigation.
Just to throw salt on the open wound.... do folks want stuff like node.js or
Windows support :) Just asking...
Cheers,
-Jim
On Sep 27, 2012, at 7:41 PM, Jeff Rogers <dv...@diphi.com> wrote:
John Buckman wrote:
SUGGESTIONS FOR A FUTURE AOLSERVER
The "state of the art" is, I think, happening in the javascript world,
with things such as node.js. If the aolserver community were really
interested in getting new users, making it a top notch
embedded-javascript web server would be a way. I'm not sure this makes
any strategic sense (nor that I need it), but there you go...
I'm far from the first person to chuckle at how netscape introduced
server-side javascript 15 years ago, it pretty much vanished for a
while, and has now come roaring back as the next big thing.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Still, a "ns_spidermonkey" module would be a interesting project.
The other area where "state of the art" thinking is occurring, is in
scaling web sites to many, many machines.
aolserver has some features to make that happen, but imagine if we had
multi-machine ns_cache support, perhaps with a file system backup (ie,
memcached)?
I was thinking about this also. There is a nsmemcache module for
naviserver, but it uses some of the C apis that have been changed
slightly in naviserver, so it doesn't work with aolserver, but it
shouldn't be difficult to port.
A version (not sure if it's the most current) is at
http://naviserver.cvs.sourceforge.net/naviserver/modules/nsmemcache/
Another bit of existing code to build a high-scalability cluster is the
Digital City extensions that the guys at AOL built sometime before 2006
(I don't know exactly when, just estimating based on timestamps) and I
believe ran some pretty big (for the day) sites on. It looks like a
hidden treasure of functionality that never got the respect it deserved.
Looking at the archives, there was some chatter about it on this list
back in 2007. What's that french saying again? :)
It currently lives at http://code.google.com/p/nsdci/
Also, support for sending an http page request to another machine (or
pool of machines) would very handy, with a single http daemon handling
them all with async io.
I don't think this would be difficult as things are now; it would make
a nice piece of example code.
-J
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