On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 01:29 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
-> Speaking from the point of view of a recent convert from the
Apache/PHP
-> world, one thing that will really lower the bar for people like me
is a
-> document (or article) along the lines of "AOLServer and Tcl for
-> Apache/PHP users." From the end user stand point it may be good to
have
-> packaged versions of AOLServer with snazzy front-ends for
configuration
-> and maintenance/status of the server. I'm not a terrific write, but
I
-> think I could maybe crank out something to assist PHP users in
getting
-> acquainted with AOLServer and Tcl. Tcl along with AOLServer's API is
-> just as powerful and extensible as PHP is. In fact it offers a lot
of
-> things that PHP simply doesn't (pooled DB connections, robust
control
-> over the use of the HTTP protocol: responses codes, headers, mime
-> types, etc.).
I think Tcl (or, rather, "single language support") is one of the big
things
holding AOLserver back. It's nice that you're all convinced of your
godliness under Tcl ;), but other smart people like other languages,
and
they're not going to switch to AOLserver if it means switching to Tcl,
however much you tell them they should. Less chauvinism on this front
would be much more welcoming, IMO; outright advertising could only
help.
I was looking at a page last night that had a list of numerous
languages available for AOLServer.
http://www.panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/0.html
Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, Scheme, Java, Perl. It seems to have most of
the [important] bases covered. What would make me most likely to try
one of those languages is whether or not they expose AOLServer's APIs.
From what I could tell PyWX and Ruby do that. I don't know about the
others. As a PHP user I'd be more willing to swap servers if I could
access the AOLServer API from PHP. As a developer, that is indeed
something I am considering pouring some free time into. At the very
least to expose ns_db to PHP to speed up page accesses. If there was
the ability to load libraries/init scripts for the PHP interpreter like
there is for the Tcl interpreter that would be even better since the
scripts would not have to load a library for each hit.
But having invested enough time in learning Tcl and playing with
AOLServer's Tcl API, there's just so much it's got that PHP doesn't.
So, it would take a lot of work for me personally to want to use PHP
rather than Tcl in AOLServer.
That's just my opinion though. ;)
- Gabriel
