Hi Jamie,
This is purely conjecture because I've never used AOLserver. However, I
have used Vignette, which is similar (and Greenspun doesn't like), and I'm
just offering thoughts based upon Vignette.
One more thing, Greenspun does know what he's talking about, and he writes
very authoritatively. This is good when he knows what he's talking about,
but it's bad when he's presenting his opinions. IE, he states his opinions
as fact, and doesn't appear to leave much room for discussion.
Cons:
TCL is interpreted. interpreted == slow (although 8.2 is better).
TCL is not that popular (in the grand scheme of things. It's much more
popular amoung *nix types, but it's still hard to find TCL programmers).
This is only important if you are building a site for someone else, or
it's going to be more than one person hacking away on it. But, TCL's
pretty easy to learn.
AOLserver is not as tested as Apache. That says nothing of its quality,
but a lot more people use/abuse/debug apache.
Pros:
Pooled connections: AOLserver automatically pools db connections. Creating
connections to dbs is what kills performance (ok, one of the things).
However, there are a lot of scripts for various architectures that do this
anyway, so as long as you know to find them, this is something of a moot
point.
Generally, my advice is to first go with what you know. If you know perl,
go mod_perl. If you know Java, go servlets. Other than that, each tool has
different strengths:
PHP: easiest to learn (?), new engine which is supposed to be pretty fast.
Cold Fusion: Smaller customer base (for commercial package), but lots of
freely available scripts for it.
ASP: crappy, but lots of industry support (big developer base)
Perl: Quick and dirty. Tons of pre-written code. Perl's arguably the most
useful scripting language to know outside of web development as well.
Java Servlets: Great for large projects -- easy to maintain
Lotus Notes: Excellent Win32 client interface. Complete solution
(everything is well integrated). Will drive you nuts.
Vignette Story Server: Great if you don't mind spending about a million
dollars on your website.
So, if you don't know anything and want to do some sort of db driven site,
I would go with PHP.
If you know Perl, or want to get a bit more complicated, go with Perl.
If you're going to be building a large site, go with Java.
If you need other people to work on it, ASP on Win and Perl on Unix.
But, here's the biggest secret about web programming. You can do just
about anything you want with any of the tools. PHP is better than Vignette
if you are a good PHP coder and crappy Vignette coder. And vice versa.
Don't get sucked into the flames -- they're all very similar.
Just my $0.05 (GST included),
Travis
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Subject: [SLUG] Opinions on AOLServer
The thread on mysql vs postgress reminded me of something that
I have been wondering.
Does anyone use, or have opinions, on AOLserver? http://www.aolserver.com
This is a web server with TCL as the scripting language builtin - a sort
of alternative to Apache+PHP.
One of the biggest boosters for this is ArsDigita
(http://www.arsdigita.com/). There are a large number of pre-canned
scripts.
There, Phil Greenspun has very strong opinions about load sharing,
databases. He even has an online book on the general topic.
I was wondering if anyone shared his views (or disagreed).
Thanks
Jamie
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