Many thanks to all those who took the time to reply to my question.
I am hugely impressed with AOLServer and plan to do some serious evaluation of
the product and the associated development process with my colleague over the
next months.
On balance - at this point in time I am leaning more toward AOLServer + TCL +
Oracle than Apache/Tomcat/Javabeans etc.
I feel much more comfortable about the scalability of the AOLServer model because
bottlenecks are much easier to find and resolve in the absence of the
multi-layered complexity inherent in the java based solutions. JVM's terrify me
more than anything else on earth when they are let loose on my computers (except
perhaps my 4 year old son)!
During the development cycle you can only imagine the pleasure I experienced
making a change to a bit of TCL, saving the file, and refreshing the page in the
browser to see the effect! While using Tomcat we invariably had to restart
tomcat to be sure of seeing changes to JSP pages. I am not sure but I believe
later versions of tomcat require Apache to be restarted also.
I have noticed some comments about the documentation - Personally, what I have
seen so far looks good, I can buy books on TCL and I can read the source.
Thanks again to all - especially those at AOL who work on the core product and
are so willing to share the fruits of their labours.
Alan Wright
