To agree with a previous poster, there are a couple of things that
really excel in ACS over Java servlets, and PHP for that matter:
1) The "new" database API is ACS is great. with db_foreach and
friends hide all the bookkeeping with database connections and
binding SQL vars to Tcl vars. That stuff works great, and is
very compact,due to the
magic Tcl "uplevel" ability to write things that look like macros.
2) String and regexp handling is very compact in Tcl, and I tend to
do a lot of it in generating HTML, as well as scraping external
data sources.
3) shared memory in AOLserver is almost as easy to use as global
shared objects in a Java servlet engine. I don't know how PHP handles
persistent shared in-core data, since if it runs under apache, each
handler will be running possibly in a different process. DO they have
some kind of inter-process shared memory, or do they have to hit
the disk somehow (like mod_aolserver used gdbm to simulate
shared memory).
