Returning to Michael Feldstein's question, will the benefits (virtual domain hosting and wide acceptance and familiarity) and improvements (multi-threading) of Apache 2.0 be something that the community will embrace?
Thankfully, Petra Paler picked up mod_aolserver and after speaking with him a little bit yesterday I'm confident he's going to do a great job. So we're in good hands here and we'll just have to see how people respond.
But I'm curious to know whether there is indeed interest in Apache from two perspectives, the evangelical and the technical.
It seems that the benefits of using Apache, which seems to improve and extend at a rate far greater than AOLserver (we'll see about OpenNSD), evangelically is rather considerable. There are a whole bunch of people out there that know and support it. Also, while people hearing about OpenACS are probably eager to check it out, they are probably a little hesitant to learn three architectures (PG, ACS and AOLserver/OpenNSD). If they just had to figure out two and can run it alongside their LAMP systems by installing ACS, PG and mod_aolserver that would be neat. The *BSD problem would also be solved, but that's just a small issue with OpenNSD which I'm confident will be solved.
But that stuff is reasonably obvious and something that I can see. What about technically? Is anybody familiar enough with both systems to give a somewhat cogent analysis of Apache vs. AOLserver/OpenNSD? Are there any issues or thing to think about? It would seem that there is a fundamental performance hit with mod_aolserver since it's a module rather than an embedded scripting language, but is there and if so how significant is it?
thanks in advance.
tal
