Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Apache support critical

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Posted by Talli Somekh on
Things would be different now because

a) .LRN is a product that is to be sold as a system that can be slid into an organizations infrastructure rather than what aD was selling - consulting services built around their preferred stack

b) mod_aolserver was a piece of crap and never was a real alternative. I don't think even the authors considered it to be anything other than a gee whiz tool. /the interest in mod_aolserver, though, was very significant/

c) The web app environment has changed considerably in the 5 years or so since aD and mod_aolserver. Apache, Linux, IIS... web development in general is a different environment. whether that is good or not is debatable, but the fact that there isn't the same lack of familiarity with web/db applciations

i'm not suggesting that AOLserver be abandoned. it's still the preferred web app server. but to penetrate IT departments at major organizations (corporate or educational) more flexibility needs to be introduced at the web server level.

furthermore, i'm intimately familiar with the crap that Apache is. remember, we tried to yank out moddav from Apache2 and stick it in AOLserver which was a disaster because the apache code is so poor. it turned out using AOLserver, Tcl and tdom was not only far more productive but far more flexible to implement this system. the success of this approach is becuase of AOLserver's focused and simple architecture.

however, Apache has proven to allow a more heterogenous system environment. for many IT orgs serving many different purposes, this is very critical (as you all well know).

i think, also, if you speak with some of the .lrn folks you will hear that many of them have had similar experiences. certainly my experience here is not unique.

John' s suggestion of either building a fastcgi interface for AOLserver or continuing portable.nsd seem to be both very effective solutions to this problem.

talli