I don't particularly know what it would take to make AOLserver more popular with the masses, but I DO know of a few things that would make it more popular with people like ME. One of them is:
Authoritative technical docs on the AOLserver core, it's design, implementation, capabilities, trade-offs, etc. Just as a sampling, it should answer questions like these two: How does AOLserver thread startup and initialization really work? How are the Tcl interpretors set up and initialized? If you want a C thread WITHOUT the overhead of a Tcl interpretor, how do you do that? What should you know when adding support for an additional scripting language? What if you want AOLserver to be able to parse it's config script in this new language? How does the "aggressive read ahead model" Jim Davidson introduced in AOLserver 4.0 work? Why is it better for HTTP than what other web servers do, like AOLserver 3.x, Apache 1.x and 2.x, etc.? If, how, and why is this model un-suitable for non-HTTP traffic? What trade-offs are involved? What would I want to do differenly for other non-HTTP protocols? Other than the code itself and a few brief comments from Jim Davidson and a few other experts buried in the list archives, AFAICT there's absolutely nothing whatsoever written covering this stuff. Jim's Tcl/Tk 2000 keynote touched on some of these (and many other interesting) issues, but necessarily only in brief detail. And that was also ** 5 years ** ago! http://www.aolserver.com/docs/intro/tcl2k/html/ AOLserver is perhaps best positioned as the "thinking hackers' server". This is a smaller niche than, "de-facto lowest common denominator web server for the masses" (Apache), but it can also be a very rewarding one. Now, how best to cultivate that narrower demographic? I argue that high qualty core internals docs would help. -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ -- 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.
