[Lispweb] Araneida

[Marc Battyani]

<jeff at inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> Quoting Marc Battyani <marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com>:
>
> > "Brian Mastenbrook" <bmastenb at cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
>
> > > I find configuring apache to be a royal pain, and not
> > > worth the added complexity.
> >
> > That you dislike Apache is your right but that is not enough to make
Apache
> > based web servers a worse solution.
>
> That some people don't mind involving Apache isn't enough to make
> Apache-based web servers a better solution either. :)

The major interest of apache is this:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

About 70% of the servers are using Apache. (that's  43174442 ones)
Having a solution that integrates well into Apache is called pragmatism.
That Apache+mod_lisp is the most performing solution to make a Lisp web
application is just a bonus.
Anyway the last time I made some benchmarks, most of the other web servers
like aserve were fast enough, being able to serve more several hundred
pages/second (that's more than 360K pages/hour) which is quite enough. It
shows that HTTP handling is largely fast enough.
IIRC the mod_lisp tests with Apache 1.3 were at 440 pages/s (1.584M pages/h)

> I'm disappointed that so many Lisp tools seem to require
> Apache + mod_something.
>
> Is the reason that people think the basic HTTP and socket levels
> are uninteresting, or is there some horrible complexity there that
> they've trying to avoid having to deal with?

The complexity is very low. (I myself once wrote a small 1.0 server in just
a few lines) That's why they are so many of them...

> With some of these systems, I'm left wondering what exactly they do,
> if they've turned so much over to Apache.
>
> It's not that hard to write an HTTP server from scratch.  That's
> what I did the last time I had to make a choice of this sort, and
> and I'm not sure there's anything in more recent systems that would
> lead me to make a different decision.
>
> What I'd like to see is some Lisp-alone system that handled the
> HTTP level very well, including cases where connections were kept
> open (I didn't do all of that in my server), and provided an easy-
> to-start-using structure on top of that.  If it came with a CLOS-
> compatible OO database, that would be ideal.
>
> The Uncommon Web structure looks like it might be good, for example,
> but I haven't examined it in detail.  Unfortunately, it seems to want
> something else to do the HTTP part.

Sure, I told you it's boring... ;-)
When I need a small stand-alone server for desktop applications I use the
paserve HTTP layer with my framework.

Marc