And I also notice you avoiding mentioning all the major *advantages* of
AOLServer that we'd essentially lose!
At the risk of speaking for Lars, that not our bag, baby.
Let me give you an example that might help out. I've written my last few big projects in perl because it ran where I needed it to and it talked to the db's I needed to talk to and it was quick to develop in. In perl land, code can be easily ported between plain old CGI.pm (the 'gold standard'), CGI::Fast (FastCGI), ASP on Apache *and* IIS (using ActiveState's Perlscript w/Win32::ASP and/or Apache::ASP) and mod_perl.
The existence of all the other deployment options in no way threatens CGI.pm. It made it healthier, in the way that open source projects with more eyes focused on them are always healthier. mod_perl did not threaten CGI.pm, or cause CGI.pm adopters to lose benefits, did it? Even borg-ifying Perlscript didn't threaten it. CGI.pm folks just went on making their stuff extremely useful, and the rest of the deployment options that adhered to its API just kept on benefitting. I see the same benefits for the OpenACS community. [ Aside: Does anyone not want the ability to deploy your application at a plain-vanilla ISP? ]
Also, something else to think about: beyond writing scripts that can be deployed pretty much wherever I or my client wants webserver/os/db-wise, perl lets me easily write scripts that I debug from the command line, using a line debugger. For some problems, I even fire up OpenIDE, a visual debugger.
Pseudo-nsd (tks, Michael) will provide the same benefits. It will make writing installers, packaging OpenACS apps, and debugging them a lot simpler, even if the deployment target is the gold standard, AOLServer.
