At 08:20 AM 11/8/2002, you wrote:
>On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 04:33:41AM -0500, Nathan Folkman wrote:
>
>> 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 think of AOLserver as a web application server, not as a general
>web server. In fact, I often use it as a swiss-army knife for networked
>applications. This should be even more interesting when libnsd is out.
>
>-Roberto
I agree with Roberto.
I consider AOLserver to be a web application server, though with the
hijacking of the name by the J2EE crowd, I am not exactly sure what a web
application server is. But I would like to see more (of something) go into
making AOLserver an even better web application server.
Support for more languages is critical to AOLserver's long term success.
The momentum these days in somewhere in the PHP, Python, J2EE, C# worlds.
If we want to attract the smart developers and if we want to make it easier
to sell into organizations, if we want to compete with these technologies,
then we need some amount of support for more languages.
There is a question of what users want when they want language support.
Do they want:
A) Apache/Zope/.... APIs?
B) Languages as independent black box modules. As an example,
support for Gallery (PHP) doesn't imply PHP support
where a PHP module can add registered filters, procs, etc.
C) Language support as cooperating modules. My java modules
can easily create/modify data structures available
to my python modules and my tcl modules.
D) Language support where each language is an equal peer with
Tcl and C. For each connection perhaps, "I" can decide
whether to attach a Tcl, Python, or Ruby interp to the
thread. I can develop registered procs and filters in any
language of my choice.
What I mainly want is stability. It aggrieves me that neither pywx nor php
are considered to be stable. That leads me to using AOLserver for Tcl, and
using Apache for PHP.
After that, I would like to see (C) cooperating modules as a goal, but would
settle for (B) independent language modules.
I am very curious as to what would make AOLserver an even better application
server than it already is. These days I suspect a very healthy support for
XML, XML-RPC, and SOAP are way up there. I suspect the move to using
standard Tcl and therefore support for standard Tcl libraries will go along
way. But what other things, in what other ways, could AOLserver support
your apps?
Jerry
