I had some thoughts about AOLserver and its marketing to the community. First, AOLserver is two things. One is Tcl, and ADP pages. And one is a high-performance multi-threaded web server. And for some reason, the two are very tightly bound to one another, when I don't think they have to be.
Which is actually the heart and soul of AOLserver? I think it's ADP - and Tcl. And I think what is the premier environment for running that? Good ole nsd. But I think the two should be split into two pieces in order for them both to do well. ADP and Tcl processing that is split off from nsd will benefit us because peopoe who want to try it out will be able to do so without installing a new webserver, if they've already got Apache. That gets people over to Tcl and ADP. And when they want to make it perform its fastest, they will want to move over to AOLserver. Not only that, now nsd is its own server - it makes sense to make it perform well with any threaded environment. People who are frightened about programming in Tcl can write in any of the other programming languages that are available. More importantly, to be able to attract users to nsd, we have to make it perform _well_ with these other environments, not only just a lame stab at it. Freeing up ADP and Tcl API's from nsd will also help bring the Tcl community in - our API's can be used by various Tcl applications, and also the Tcl community can help improve upon them. The big fear is that what if ADP on Apache outperforms - or even just matches - performance of ADP on AOLserver? Well, nsd had better outperform it! If it doesn't, this will be the kick it needs to make it do so. And if in the end, it doesn't outperform ADP/Apache, then, well, it deserves to be beaten. You hook 'em with the ADP system, which runs anywhere, then you bring 'em home to nsd when they need it perform its absolute best. I could also see people going the other way - I know some people who are tired of apache - and interested in trying something new. De-coupled nsd might be one of the ways they could go. And if we could leverate nsd's high-performance and threaded nature to efficiently and quickly run PHP scripts, that would be great - more users, more people contributing to the codebase. Anyways, those are my thoughts on how to market AOLserver - and some technology directions that I think would help. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
