Email with Brian Slesinsky
I got an email this afternoon from Brian Slesinsky, bslesins@best.com; a WebMonkey. Following is his email, and my response.From Brian
The Betty thing you're working on sounds like a real win - it actually sounds a lot an Apache module. If I ever need to connect my system with a Frontier database it's great to know that I'll be able to use XML to do it.
However, I'm still hesitant about using Frontier for my own stuff. Putting aside my bias towards Unix for the moment, if you wanted to convince me, here are some of the issues I'd need to hear more about:
Performance: I don't know from your Betty pages how fast a Frontier server is or how much CPU and disk I/O it uses. When Betty is further along it would be cool if you did some performance tests. How does a Frontier Responder compare to an Apache module written in Perl? (Not that it has to be faster, but it can't be too much slower.)
Reliability: Eventually I hope to hear a recommendation from someone who has used Frontier as a server for a heavily loaded web site (as opposed to creating the files that are served by another web server). There are sure to be bugs to fix along the way. So who goes first?
Language: I don't mind learning another language myself, but I prefer to write my scripts in a language that other programmers know how to read. Otherwise I get stuck being the only person who knows how to maintain the server. So I'd be more comfortable if I knew other programmers who use Frontier and plan to continue using it.
My response
Brian, thanks for the interest.
Who goes first? We do. We're shaking out bugs. They're still showing up as we increase the load on the server. But we're also fixing them. We're committed to betty.userland.com being a high performance 7-by-24 server running just Frontier on Windows NT.
Re reliability issues, there are people who have been running Frontier behind Mac web servers in mission-critical situations for several years. Of course since the Windows software is so new, there aren't a lot of sites to point to.
Re the language, we want to run Perl inside Frontier, also Tcl and JavaScript. Frontier's advantage is the environment, not any particular syntax choice. But the fastest applications will probably always be in Frontier's native language.
Re performance comparison with Perl, I don't know, but we can do so many things that Perl, which is just a language, can't do. The websiteFramework responder is a huge gateway. It's really more comparable to what Vignette does than what Perl does.
Also, we want to totally embrace Apache/Win. It helps us refine our not-from-Microsoft position, as a selling advantage. I'm finding out that there's a large part of the Windows market that goes independent of Microsoft.
|
This page was last built on 3/9/98; 5:37:16 PM by Dave Winer. dave@scripting.com |