The point is valid. If I mention AOLServer to anyone, the first
response is pretty much what you'd expect. Does it come with 1000 free
hours? etc.
Couple that with the fact that the overall market for tcl based
webservers (or tcl in general) is vanishingly small...
Regarding documentation, I don't think the problem is whether it's in
print, etc, etc, but rather that there is much that is missing or wrong
in the existing documentation, and some new functionality that is pretty
much entirely non-documented. And little stuff like John Buckman
pointed out the other day, where comments, code snippets or pieces of
documentation are just plain misleading.
AOLServer was probably at it's peak around the photo.net/wtr days and
this was probably because there was a big batch of non-tcl non-aolserver
stuff there (thoughts about architecture, sql tutorials, general http
tutorials, a big message base etc) oh and by the way, here's a tool that
really rocks for doing this kind of stuff. Also, at the time, AOLServer
was far ahead of most of the competition regarding multi-threading,
reusable database thread pools, multiple persistent interpreters
available with no startup-cost, etc. Most of the competition have
caught up to the point where that is not a compelling issue to switch to
aolserver UNLESS you are already a tcl developer. A campaign to get
tclhttpd users to switch might be in order although there aren't many of
those (note: switching is pretty easy, I switched 90% of an enterprise
level application from one to the other in a few days, mostly by
implementing some key parts of the tclhttpd api in aolserver. This is a
testament to how easy it is to build stuff in aolserver).
Another stumbling block for some, but a plus for me, is that aolserver
is 100% bare bones. As it comes out of the box, it does almost nothing,
compared to apache which has modules for everything and basically you
can mix and match those to do pretty much any common web hosting task
you like. That sucks if you want to download aolserver and immediately
use it, but it's great if you want a blank canvas to impose your will
upon, which is difficult to impossible with most web servers, which
impose an Architecture on you.
Just my thoughts.
Dossy Shiobara wrote:
On 2006.09.01, Janine Sisk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well... yes, all our customers who are technically savvy enough to
understand know that we use AOLserver. Unfortunately, the fact that
OpenACS requires AOLserver is a hindrance in the sales cycle, and
there have been repeated requests from many people over the years for
OpenACS to run under Apache (which is never going to happen). Part
of the problem is the association with AOL - rightly or wrongly, that
inspires a "fight or flight" response in many of the IT people we
talk to. But the biggest issue is that it's different, and
Enterprise customers generally don't want to take on a new web server
for their admins to have to learn and support.
I find this kind of funny since organizations are willing to support
Tomcat, or WebSphere, etc.
It's conceivable that you could run Apache as the web server (handling
HTTP requests) sitting in front of AOLserver as the "application
server." We all understand why this is largely unnecessary, but
presumably it would get you past the auto-immune reaction of your
customers.
-- Dossy
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