Perl would be tricky, but a few years ago, when
we were just starting to get serious about PyWX, someone mentioned that
they'd started a Perl integration project for AOLserver. I'd be interested
in taking a look at it as a possible winter break project, if it's still
around.
If you were willing and able to sign up for this, I think that would be great! While historically a fair amount of work has been done to integrate AOLserver with Tcl, there's really nothing stopping you from making it work as well with other languages. If there are things which aren't encapsulated well, and make the integration of other languages difficult, then we should enumerate and look at addressing those items.
While we will continue to improve AOLserver's integration with Tcl, I think there is definitely merit in providing compatibility with other languages as well. Tcl is a great scripting language, but not well suited for all tasks. One real world example I can think of is some index creation code which we recently moved from Tcl to Perl. Perl provided much higher throughput, and lower memory usage overall.
I hope to continue to see people stepping up to support different languages: Tcl, Perl, Python, Java, PHP, etc. If there server is well designed, and things are abstracted correctly, then there would be no reason not to support as many languages as possible.
I believe that a big part of AOLserver's success in the future will be based on the community's unbiased approach to its development - it is just a web server afterall! ;-) The thing that always amazes me are the different applications that people have built using the AOLserver.
- n
