Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: AOLserver advocacy

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4: Re: AOLserver advocacy (response to 3)
Posted by Brian Fenton on
Here's what my boss put together.

From: Ciaran De Buitlear

Just to clarify: we write web sites using ADP pages which are equivalent to ASP pages.

I would consider that the web server (Apache or AOLserver) supports the toolkit.  There are modifications available for Apache which support  both ASP and our toolkit.  Unfortunately, AOLserver doesn't support ASP which is a proprietary development environment (owned by Microsoft - maybe that's why!).    Our choice of web server was based on performance and scalability for a database backed transaction processing environment - where AOLserver wins hands down over Apache in my opinion.

As you can see from this article in Linuxworld...

http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-09/lw-09-aolserver_1-p3.html

...AOLserver has "Strong support for database-backed Web services."... particularly with an  ..."Oracle back-end".

Further "In short, AOLserver represents a packaged solution for high-volume Web sites, whereas Apache has lots of unbundled components that may be combined in various ways. "

Or this comparison of web servers on TIVEA...

http://www.tivea.net/Web%20Servers.html

..."America Online's own web server, is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server used for large scale, dynamic web sites. "

Other organisations that use AOLserver:
AOL , Netscape.com, OpenSpec Inc. (bom.com) ,  Fox Cable Networks , The U.S. Department of Defense .

So you could describe this as using horses (web servers) for courses (applications).  I presume most web sites don't do any heavy transaction processing. I further presume that an average web design company wouldn't build a heavy database backed transaction processing web site.