[AOLSERVER] Windows Support
Dear all, I do not think that removing Windows specific code is a good idea. Some time ago I showed as example how many people have downloaded ]project-open[ on Windows as opposed to the VM, or the tar ball. In case you do not remember the numbers, please have a look at this URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-open/files/project-open/ The idea of using some kind of emulation is also questionable. Why? Suppose we want to have Aolserver on Windows , then the emulation layer would impose unacceptable inefficiencies. Here we are not talking about using some emulation layer to run some ancillary programs, called every now and then (e.g. dot, wget, and so on), but Aolserver itself (i.e. nsd), the very heart of every OpenACS based web application. The same type or reasoning applies to the database engine (e.g. postgresql), it would be a major error running it on some emulation layer. What is the current status of these emulation layers? I know everybody is thinking about Cygwin... But Cygwin is, at the time being only a Win32 application. Nowadays all the servers are 64 bit machines. Soon the same will be for desktop and laptop computers. With Cygwin on 64 bit Windows machine we have double emulation: Linux/Unix Application - Cygwin/ Posix emulation - WOW64/ Win32 emulation (this is Windows 32 emulated on Windows 64) - Windows 64 I cant see any sign of Cygwin moving towards Windows 64. Last year in summer there was an interesting discussion about that (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.cygwin.devel/233/focus=247) but nothing happened because the effort is too big and nobody had enough energy to spend on it. For how long will WOW64 be supported by Microsoft? It is already an option in the core part of Windows Server 2008 R2 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd371790%28v=vs.85%29.aspx). MingGW can now compile for Windows 64 but it lacks the Posix emulation available in Cygwin. Another (kind of emulation) solution would be compiling Aolserver with Visual Studio 2010 (or 2012) + SUA SDK (Utilities and SDK for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications) (these two build both in 32 and 64). I am sure very few people know about this possibility. So what are the feasible options? I believe there are only two (well three) options: 1. we maintain the Windows code inside Aolserver (I favour this) 2. we compile Unix only code via the SUA SDK 3. we forget about Windows and we use real emulation, that is a VM running Linux But how many people are willing to download a VM of 1.5 GB or so just to test a system? A Windows installer of 150MB or so is much, much more attractive. Later on, if they are happy with the system, people can stick to Windows or use Linux for production. What do you think? Maurizio -Original Message- From: Wolfgang Winkler [mailto:wolfgang.wink...@digital-concepts.com] Sent: 27 September 2012 09:11 To: aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [AOLSERVER] TCL websockets Implementation Hi! I've cleaned up our websockets code a bit (ah, the joy of it), it should run now on a basic AOLserver install. Where should I post it? Wolfgang -- digital concepts OG Software Design Landstrasse 68 / 5. Stock A - 4020 Linz Büro: +43 732 99711772 Mobil: +43 699 19971172 -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;258768047;13503038;j? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html ___ aolserver-talk mailing list aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aolserver-talk -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;258768047;13503038;j? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html ___ aolserver-talk mailing list aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aolserver-talk
Re: [AOLSERVER] Windows Support
On 2012-09-27, at 1:56 AM, Maurizio Martignano maurizio.martign...@spazioit.com wrote: So what are the feasible options? I believe there are only two (well three) options: 1. we maintain the Windows code inside Aolserver (I favour this) 2. we compile Unix only code via the SUA SDK 3. we forget about Windows and we use real emulation, that is a VM running Linux But how many people are willing to download a VM of 1.5 GB or so just to test a system? You might be surprised to hear that #3 and large downloads don't faze a lot of people if it means they get something that works. ActiveState moved to this model with Stackato (a cloud platform - basically Heroku-in-a-box), and we haven't heard concerns about download size[1]. It's a custom linux vm that people can use from any OS (and we have plenty that use it on or from Windows). However, that's just a point that such things exist and are accepted. I for one would vote to keep the Windows support in AOLserver. I don't think it's that hard anymore (having done dev on so many platforms over the years), especially if you leverage the Tcl code base to the fullest extent. What I would recommend is only sticking with an msys-based build system (this means 'configure; make' on Windows). If someone really wants to maintain an MSVC makefile that's fine, but I wouldn't agonize over it. If you look at the latest TEA config files, they enable this cross-platform build portability pretty well. You can still build with MSVC (or mingw-gcc), but you use GNU tools via msys. How people operate on Windows without msys or similar tools is a mystery to me. ;) Jeff [1] while we agonized about cracking through 1G download sizes early on, the other day I saw a kid not think twice about downloading 1.4G on his Xbox just to get a _demo_ of a game. The days of download limits are mostly gone. -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;258768047;13503038;j? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html ___ aolserver-talk mailing list aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aolserver-talk
Re: [AOLSERVER] Windows Support
How about making AolServer nothing more than a TEA-compliant extension? Maybe we could create an ns_main command that created a thread that did all the AolServer stuff (i.e., listen on sockets, create connection pools, etc. etc.) and just run it in tclsh. I never looked at TEA close enough to know if that's a ridiculous idea... -Jim On Sep 27, 2012, at 11:25 AM, Jeff Hobbs je...@activestate.com wrote: On 2012-09-27, at 1:56 AM, Maurizio Martignano maurizio.martign...@spazioit.com wrote: So what are the feasible options? I believe there are only two (well three) options: 1. we maintain the Windows code inside Aolserver (I favour this) 2. we compile Unix only code via the SUA SDK 3. we forget about Windows and we use real emulation, that is a VM running Linux But how many people are willing to download a VM of 1.5 GB or so just to test a system? You might be surprised to hear that #3 and large downloads don't faze a lot of people if it means they get something that works. ActiveState moved to this model with Stackato (a cloud platform - basically Heroku-in-a-box), and we haven't heard concerns about download size[1]. It's a custom linux vm that people can use from any OS (and we have plenty that use it on or from Windows). However, that's just a point that such things exist and are accepted. I for one would vote to keep the Windows support in AOLserver. I don't think it's that hard anymore (having done dev on so many platforms over the years), especially if you leverage the Tcl code base to the fullest extent. What I would recommend is only sticking with an msys-based build system (this means 'configure; make' on Windows). If someone really wants to maintain an MSVC makefile that's fine, but I wouldn't agonize over it. If you look at the latest TEA config files, they enable this cross-platform build portability pretty well. You can still build with MSVC (or mingw-gcc), but you use GNU tools via msys. How people operate on Windows without msys or similar tools is a mystery to me. ;) Jeff [1] while we agonized about cracking through 1G download sizes early on, the other day I saw a kid not think twice about downloading 1.4G on his Xbox just to get a _demo_ of a game. The days of download limits are mostly gone. -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;258768047;13503038;j? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html ___ aolserver-talk mailing list aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aolserver-talk -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;258768047;13503038;j? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html ___ aolserver-talk mailing list aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aolserver-talk
