Hi, While we're talking about supporting alternative languages, debuggers & a little about compilers. How about writing an OpenACS-styled compiler that can compile a language into Tcl.
Ok, it might sound a bit silly perhaps and it definately won't be suitable for a lot of languages (definately not for Java). For other languages, like PHP, the idea sounds very feasible. To those unknown to the OpenACS compiler; OpenACS has its own adp parser which is way more powerfull than the AOLserver adp parser. An OpenACS adp page is compiler into a tcl script which is executed when the page is requested. The compiler overhead is almost completely eliminated by use of the nscache module, each page is only compiled once. What's the idea? Well, such a compiler would not be a very large piece of Tcl code as far as I can see, which can easily be maintained and supported by the AOLserver community. Asking people to join the PHP project to maintain and improve the AOLserver specific code is a lot less fun for the AOLserver community. After all we are TCL-coders. Another advantage might be that it is possible to map some library functions onto AOLserver native APIs and I'm specifically talking about database APIs here. Suppose the PHP MySQL interface is mapped to the AOLserver database API. AOLserver has connection pooling, so scalability improves. While the compiler might not be a lot of code, the libraries would be; PHP comes with a lot of them. This is a disadvantage. However, while the compiler would need a little more skilled programmers, library functions can be written by any AOLserver programmer; the community might be able to provide a lot of them. Well, I was that enthousiastic of the idea that I started doing programming, and within 3 hours (!) I programmed a working tokenizer for PHP. A parser would be a bit more work of course, but it seems the idea is very feasible. Greetings, Dani�l Mantione -- 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.
