On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 04:25:46PM -0500, Dossy Shiobara wrote:

> > Let's admit it, AS will never get so popular as apache or IIS and all
> > efforts for making it popular without something that will
> > differentiate it from apache is waste of time.
>
> Maybe I'm deluded, but I'm not ready to admit this yet.  Just as we
> learned about the web browser war ... the web server war is far from
> over.

This raises another thought.  Dossy wants AOLserver to be much more
popular than it is.  Ok, what is most likely to cause that?  Simple:
One or more killer apps that happen to use AOLserver.

Think about it this way, what percentage of AOLserver's popularity is
entirely due to ACS/OpenACS?  A big chunk, I bet.  And OpenACS never
became hugely popular, but it what if it had?  AOLserver popularlity
would have rode with it.  And OpenACS is an example of just ONE
potential AOLserver-using killer app.  How many COULD there be?  LOTS!

Here's the ironic bit:  Where could these new killer apps come from?
Quite possibly, from projects like those using Stepen D.'s or Vlad's
patches for multi-protocol support (using Asterisk, etc.) - which the
AOLserver maintainer has been blocking.  Or from some other entirely
different enhancement to AOLserver, which will never be contributed
because AOLserver has a pretty strong record of rejecting (or worse,
ignoring) any such contributions.  Oops, no more killer app!

Just this week, a bunch of OpenACS folks were discussing (yet again)
how to sell OpenACS into Apache shops.  Technically, the two major
proposals boiled down to:

1. Add FastCGI support to AOLserver.  (Then AOLserver can be used as
"just" another application server running behind Apache, just like the
Java application servers, etc. that lots of Apache shops already run.)

2. Work on portable.nsd a lot more.  (Use it with Apache, no AOLserver
involved at all.)

Here's the kicker:

The guy who'd probably do most of the work, John Sequeira, seems to
think that option 1. is a better idea technically, but is leaning
towards 2. instead, because after following the AOLserver
multi-protocol discussions, he doubts that any FastCGI work would ever
be accepted by the AOLserver maintainers, no matter what!

  http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=263944

That looks symptomatic of a problem in how the AOLserver codebase is
managed to me.  Dossy, doesn't it look that way to you too?

--
Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.piskorski.com/


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