From: MikkelFJ <mikkelfj-anti-spam@...>
Date: 2003-02-28T17:42:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Application Server


"Wai-Sun Chia" <waisun.chia@hp.com> wrote in message
news:3E5EE34A.9080405@hp.com...

> Radical & Borges are related in the sense that both of them are inspired
> by Seaside. IOWA in fact is the poorer cousin of the much-improved
> Smalltalk-based Seaside. These 3 claims to have a better model than
> servlet-based app servers, in the sense it has linear control over a
> session, as compared to a bunch of servlet handlers. I say this only in
> theory as I do not have live experience with them.

Disclaimer: I have no experience with the above except reading some of the
Seaside docs.

The benefits of the Seaside model may come at a cost: It is easy track
navigation, but you may loose control over the server resources. If you
expect many simultanous users you probably need tighter control over what is
stored in the session state and for how long. This may be doable or hackable
with the above by intercepting history and pushing it to disk, or
serializing it to compact in-memory structures.

You may also need to be able to control recovery or fail-over, which can be
difficult with the Seaside model up front. Finally there may be issues with
load balancing.

These are some of the reasons why many tediously store things in databases
and write lots of code to pool database caches and maintain stateless
frontend servers.

On the other hand, if you have a complex application with few users, the
Seaside model may be perfect.

You may also not need to track as much state as Seaside.

There is never such a thing as "just buy bigger hardware". This is not to
say Ruby is not a viable solution, but it is important to focus on
scalability - for example supporting multiple connected servers so you can
add _more_ hardware, and by never abusing resources.


Mikkel