Re: [AOLSERVER] Roadmap Revisited (was Re: Is there anyone out there?)

[Jeff R. <dv...@di...>]

Ok, I've been sitting on this response for far too long now, I may as 
well just send it out, perfection be damned.

That was probably my thread on "4.6 and beyond" you mentioned.  Lots of 
energy ... then life happened, and time vanished.  I'd still love to 
make things happen, I'm just short on energy right now.

I don't think the existing userbase has particularly held anyone back 
from making changes, bold or otherwise.  After all, people can always 
not upgrade.  (According to the reports, a significant portion of 
aolserver users are still using version 4.0 or even 3).  So if you want 
to make changes - make them!  The wonderful thing about source control 
is that you get to keep your old stuff around.

About source control - this isn't the first time someone has suggested 
using something else.  Frankly, the strongest arguments for moving away 
from CVS and to something else from from Chris Tsai at SF support.  To 
paraphrase, "cvs hosting is absolutely awful to support for a lot of 
reasons, and needs regular maintenance windows.  Pretty much anything 
else is better."   The SCM system in use is not going to attract 
developers that would not have been otherwise interested, IMHO.

That's not to say a change would hurt, but my strongest inclination at 
this point would be to move to svn or hg.  (or fossil, but that seems to 
be even less mainstream than cvs, plus SF doesn't support it).
If there's an overwhelming outcry of voices demanding a move, that 
increases the motivation.  "Overwhelming" here would mean 2 or 3 :)

Until then (or after) if you have any patches to submit, by all means 
send then and I'll be happy to take a look, and most likely merge it in 
- I've mellowed somewhat since the last time a patch was shared (sorry John)

All this said, NaviServer *IS* much more active these days, and lacks 
the "smirk factor" that the name "AOLserver" carries.  And a lot of the 
goals you mention (in particular, code cleanup) are regularly undertaken 
by Gustaf.

WRT Maurizio's comments:

> 1. social media are making legacy CMS and standard web sites less and less
> important
> 2. web and mobile application are moving towards architectures with rich
> clients (e.g. html5 based like SensaTouch, Oracle ADF, SAP SUP) and these
> architectures are moving away from the legacy web application and
> development model offered by Aolserver/Naviserver - OpenACS.

Legacy CMS and standard web sites are by no means going away.  Even the 
html5-iest site needs a server behind it, and even if most of the 
display logic is on the client in the javascript framework of the week 
if you want to be able to persist and share your updates the best way is 
still to have a database backing it up.

What is getting less important is the ADP programming style of 
interleaving logic and layout.  acs-templating is a great approach to 
this tho, and there will continue to be a need to take data from a 
database and put it into some deliverable form.

Which raises a few questions with suggestions of projects around them.

The data format of choice these days seems to be json, with xml still 
being a significant player.  So, how is our support for those things?

XML - tdom works very well with aolserver, and is better than most xml 
handling anywhere, regardless of programming language.  (It doesn't do 
XQuery, but I can live with that).  My only gripe is that it's a 
standard tcl package rather than an aolserver module, but that's a 
difference hardly worth quibbling over.

JSON - not so much.  At least, not that people have talked about.  There 
is a good json library available in yajl-tcl (aside from the array-list 
mapping that plagues all the tcl-json libraries), which I have every 
expectation would work well in aolserver, but I haven't tested.  Plus it 
could probably benefit from integration with the native database 
operators, rather than only working with postgres handles.  Anyone 
interested in putting together the pieces here?

Speaking of databases, one of aolserver's biggest strengths has always 
been its database connectivity.  Granted, in the early days that was 
because Oracle took 5 minutes and 5Mb for a connection so pooling was a 
huge win when no one else was doing it, but it's still a good thing. 
But that's about relational database, what about these fancy newfangled 
no-ess-kyoo-ell databases that I've been hearing so much about (in 
between yelling at kids to stay off my lawn)?  Some of them have purely 
REST apis (e.g., couchdb) while others have C apis that might benefit 
from ns_db style pooling, or might just benefit from having a nice 
interfact (mongodb, redis).  They may or may not have a query language, 
but the bdb driver shows a way with that.

Anyone interested in writing drivers for these?

(BTW: I *WILL* fix the sqlite driver soon - I promise!  Although, since 
no one has complained about it, I doubt anyone is actually using it, 
which is a shame.)

There's other cool stuff that could be integrated too.  There's lots of 
interest in making CSS not suck so much, so there are things like LESS 
and SASS.  Having tight integration with either of those would be nice. 
  Or a similar flavor, based around a high-performance C-coded css 
parser, perhaps.  Any interest in taking this on?

Then there's programming languages.  Don't get me wrong, I love tcl. 
But there are other things out there, and more importantly, applications 
written in other stuff out there.  So why not take spidermonkey and 
write a module for that so we could run javascript on the server?  (hey, 
why not run node.js on aolserver and be able to use multiple cores?)

SPDY and HTTP/1.1 are good goals too.

So ...

All of the above are (I think) interesting projects.  But they don't 
mean a thing unless someone is using them.  OpenACS is great in that 
regard: it is a more or less complete application.  But there are other 
things that can be done also, and I think it's restrictive to think of 
aolserver as just the engine to power OpenACS.

I guess what this all comes down to is a few key questions:
1: what do you want to build?
2: what is needed to help you build that better/faster/stronger?
3: why aren't we doing it?

We need an answer to #1, get #3 out of the way, and then #2 is the way 
forward.

-J


Ayan George wrote:
> On 05/11/2014 10:50 AM, Dossy Shiobara wrote:
>> On 5/10/14 9:38 PM, Ayan George wrote:
>>> aolserver-talk has been quiet for a while.  Has the discussion
>>> moved somewhere else?
>> Not that I'm aware of ... but, it's possible there's some
>> NaviServer-focused list that has much more activity than this one.
>>
>
> First, sorry for the rambly email.
>
> I remember a really encouraging thread titled "Roadmap - 4.6 and beyond"
> but nothing seemed to come of it.
>
> Perhaps now that usage is fairly low it is time to start making bold
> changes to improve and modernize the code AND to attract new developers
> and users.
>
> I don't think inertia or alienating users would be a valid argument
> against changes at this point.
>
> This is a good time to set some hard goals, delegate tasks, etc.  This
> time, however, maybe Dossy can suss out what seems worthwhile and make
> it happen?
>
> Personally, I would like to see the following:
>
> * Define the scope and goals of AOLserver.  Personally, I'd like
> AOLserver to be a high performance, programmable, TCL based web server
> for Unix-like operating systems.
>
> * Identify subsystems and assign a maintainer to each.  Initially this
> may be the same person or small group but the goal would be to delegate
> ownership.
>
> * Completely commit to a traditional git workflow.  Accept patches on
> the -talk submitted using list for review.  Have subsystem maintainers
> apply patches.  Dossy then pulls from each maintainer's tree to cut a
> release.
>
> * Drop Windows support unless it is exceedingly easy to do.  Right now
> there are 86 #ifdef _WIN32 instances in the code -- IMHO, there should
> be 0.  Why worry about alienating an incredibly small (maybe
> non-existent) sliver of an already tiny community?
>
> * Allow, encourage, maybe insist upon more modern programming
> techniques.  There is a lot of classic C89 or pre-C89 code in AOLserver.
> Many open source projects balk at using C99 features citing compiler
> support and developer familiarity but C99 is about 15 years old now and
> well supported.  I think AOLserver would be a more attractive if we
> explicitly required C99 features that can improve the quality of the
> code (inline declarations, declarations in for() loops, restrict
> pointers, etc.).
>
> A simple goal like converting for() loops to c99 in-loop-declarations or
> adding restrict keywords where useful would give developers an
> opportunity to get familiar with the code without doing any heavy lifting.
>
> * Modernize the main event loop.  Perhaps use libevent for socket
> multiplexing and thread dispatch.  This will allow it to take advantage
> of superior multiplexing techniques like kqueue() and epoll().
>
> * SPDY, HTTP 1.1, HTTP 2.0?
>
> * Support for deferred accepts (FreeBSD AcceptFilters, Linux
> TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT).
>
> * Ongoing code clean-up, feature addition, optimization, and bug fixes.
>
> Bottom line though is that I'm not sure if we should be afraid to break
> anything.  I don't think anyone will notice. :^)
>
> -ayan
>