Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to Corporate LMS

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10: Response to Corporate LMS (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 08/22/02 10:04 PM
Chip or Jack,

I've had a lot of success pitching AOLserver, but I've never really gone into a Fortune 500 company to do so. But I did just come back from Linux World where I spent a few days talking about AOLserver and here is my basic pitch (I've promised to write this up as a general article). This is the basic 5 minute pitch. (For a more complete discussion see Philg's article which is still quite accurate for most applications)*:

The OpenACS is built mainly around AOLserver, a free and open source web application server that runs some of the largest sites on the internet. These include Moviefone.com, Mapquest.com, DigitalCities.com, home.Nescape.com, search.Netscape.com and, of course, AOL.com. As you may imagine it can handle some pretty serious load.

The reason that we, and AOL, use it is because it provides such a powerful Rapid Application Development platform. It is generally analogous to Apache+mod_xxx, but with features that are far more powerful.

From its beginning, AOLserver has been designed to do one thing and do it very very well. It's designer, Jim Davidson a guru-level C programmer, began building it in the mid-90's. He had a few ideas that still hold true, which were:

  • If it's going to run on Unix, it should be multi-threaded C code AOLserver, from the beginning, has had a multi-threaded architecture taking advantage of one of the best characteristics of Unix. Apache has only recently become multi-threaded, and that's the latest version which is still being tuned.
  • If you're going to build a big website, you're probably going to use a database So AOLserver has a native database API making db calls super easy and efficient. To make matters even better, AOLserver has pooled database connections. AOLserver had this before Websphere (which has pooled JDBC connections) was even a glint in a Java developer's eye.
  • Finally, if you're going to build a database-backed website, you're *not* going to want to build it in C Jim realized that a scripting language is the ideal tool for building websites quickly. As a result, he embedded a tcl interpreter, which was the hot scripting language of the mid-90's, right into AOLserver. AOLserver has .adp pages, which are like .jsp or .asp pages, that make webpage development super fast. And because they call a native DB API from within a multi-threaded unix daemon that also pools the DB connections, the entire process is amazingly efficient.
One other great feature of AOLserver is that it has a *single* configuration file. *Everything* is set up from one place making maintenance a breeze. Any apache systems administrator would find this feature to be a God-send.

So in total, AOLserver is a system that provides massively rapid development that provides rapid app development, trusted performance and simple configuration and maintenance.

talli

* = Excuse any marketroidisms