On 9/25/07, Alex Queiroz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 9/25/07, Peter Bex <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 09:04:19AM -0400, William Ramsay wrote: > > > Why would anyone use anything else? > > Would you mind convincing my boss? :) > Get into the queue! :-)
For what it's worth, I *did* convince my boss; I've used Chicken to write a set of Web applications to supplement one of our campus systems. None of the apps was supposed to last more than a semester -- we expected that the primary system itself would grow the same features during that time -- so they were somewhat willing to let me take a couple risks. But that was two semesters ago, and the Chicken apps are still in business. They've only served about 2 million requests so far (about 10,000 per day right now), which is far from huge, but they can take a heavier load. Lord knows I've had a couple problems with them (mostly self-inflicted ones), but overall it's been a tremendous win. Some of the things I would have used in my elevator pitch for Chicken (keeping in mind that Web apps are my thing): - running an application in a REPL (no compilation step; redefine anything you want, any time) is the rapidest development environment you can get, bar none. - It's also a great maintenance environment; almost all bugs can be corrected live, without restarting a single process. - works with all major databases (don't use that Fawcett guy's Oracle driver, though, it's a piece of crap); works great without them, too. - can use third-party libraries written in C, Java, Python. - You can compile the stuff that needs to run faster. Web apps don't tend to have too many hotspots, though. - Chicken and Scheme are relatively easy to learn, and there are plenty of resources available. - works great in a Unix environment, where forking processes is cheap: you can write small, fast programs that are suitable for Unix-style design (forks, pipes, etc.). Try *that* with Java. This is a good approach for shared-nothing, highly-scalable apps. Not that I wrote mine that way... ;-) - What the community lacks in size, it makes up for in brain-power and supportiveness. Everyone here knows that stuff, of course. ;-) Graham _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users