cro wrote: it was possible to setup different test scenarios and keep them from stepping on each other. That's really hard with Apache.
Andrew wrote?" Why is it that, exactly? It's hard to run Apache on a seprate port (why?), or?
I guess our troubles stemmed from 2 things: 1) Apache in its default packaging (configure; make; make install) sort of assumes it is the only copy of itself on a given machine. Even the Debian packages assume there is only one copy. Apache needs lots of shared libraries nowadays, and you have to go through some gyrations to get it to look elsewhere. With AOLserver, all that can be changed in the config file. And we used to use mod_perl, which could break in unexpected ways if you upgraded your Perl the "wrong" way and forgot to recompile and rebuild Apache.
The second problem we had dealt more with the Mason package than Apache itself, but Mason (which we used to use before switching to ACS) also wouldn't allow you to run more than one version at a time or have more than one component root per Apache, so we could not develop with a later version or have more than one developer on the same machine do stuff without potentially breaking stuff for the other developers.
My goal was to be able to have our sites completely in CVS, config files and all, so we could check out to production or have developers check out copies and work on them "live" (e.g. with a full server behind them hooked to the database and all), and AOLserver made that possible. Also AOLserver generally has very few external dependencies--pretty much everything you need ends up in the AOLserver install directory (except for things like the shared libraries for nsxml and nsopenssl), and that seems to be a good thing. Apache is just so *big*, tracking down everything you need to duplicate an install on another box is troublesome...
So, Andrew, I'm not sure if I answered your question. Yes, you can run Apache on another port fairly easily, but running/testing different versions of Apache, or different versions of components inside of Apache (like mod_perl or Mason or things that need shared libraries), or supporting multiple developers on one machine is hard. Not impossible, I don't think, just hard.
