[AOLSERVER] Discussing AOLserver at the Tcl/Tk conference

[Matthew M. Burke]

Later this week, the 18th Tcl/Tk conference will be held and one of the
sessions is a panel discussing the different ways to use Tcl to do web
development.

I have been asked to discuss AOLserver and as I finish up my notes, I
thought I should check with the folks on this list to see if there's
anything that you'd recommend I mention.

If I was more organized, I'd post my notes for folks to peruse in
advance. But, alas, I'm not... I will get them posted as soon as I can.

Just to give you a rough idea of my perspective: I started using
AOLserver at Ars Digita in the late 90s. Since then I've used it (in
conjunction with .LRN) while on the faculty at St. Mary's College to
support my classes, and have off-and-on used it to run a few, very
low-traffic, personal sites.

Thanks for your advice/suggestions,

Matt

--
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[Jeff Rogers]

I think from the tcl perspective the interp management is interesting.
Interps are initialized with a startup script (created through
introspection) and reused by multiple requests without reinitializing
(cleaned up after each request, again using introspection).

-J

[Jim Davidson]

Agreed -- this has always been one of the must unique and/or goofy aspects of AOLserver and Tcl. I gave the keynote at the 7th (yes, 7th!) tcl/tk conference years ago:

http://www.aolserver.com/docs/intro/tcl2k/

You could mention how this work has continued on and off over the years. In particular, we added the "ns_ictl" command to do some of the state capture/restore stuff and allow for various callbacks at interp and connection state changes as Jeff mentioned. At this point I think we'd be breaking some backwards compatibility to move further forward, e.g., relying on "package" and "ns_ictl" entirely and dumping the various module/tcl/ stuff. But, that could be worth it to gain more natural access to Tcl extensions which are often more refined and useful than the crude AOLserver analogs (e.g., ns_sendmail).

The work was done for performance which was more important 10+ years ago. By comparison, it's a fair criticism that Apache/PHP apps often re-init way too much page after page, relying on full-page level caching and other tricks to get closer to the performance of AOLserver/Tcl.

-Jim

[Alexey Pechnikov]

I don't know the fast Tcl extension to parse HTTP headers.
May be wrapping this project
https://github.com/joyent/http-parser
will be useful to build pure Tcl web servers.

--
Best regards, Alexey Pechnikov.
http://pechnikov.tel/