Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[David Starner]

On 3 Dec 2000 20:25:10 -0800, pete@nospam wrote:
>"We initially spent our focus on C, C++, Java, Perl, Eiffel, 
>Sather, SmallTalk, Ada, Objective-C, Pascal, and even Tcl."
>
>...
>
>"Then we dropped Ada because we couldn't find the right 
>libraries (apparently web server development isn't big with Ada)."
>
>--------------
>
>The above shows how importrant having standard libraries are.

Not standard libraries - the only language with huge standard libraries
on that list is Java. Eiffel, Sather, Objective-C, Pascal and Tcl (and
Smalltalk?) also have a paucity of library support; not coincidintly,
Eiffel, Objective-C, Pascal, Tcl and Ada all have decent support for
binding to C routines, at least in modern implementations. (I'm not
familiar with Sather or Smalltalk in this regard.) In some cases, it's
rather trivial to make a thin binding to a language. In others, it's
easier to just write in the language - since GUI's probably fall in the
second group, it's good that GTKAda exists. 

The big problem with a large library collection for Ada is that it takes
work to write and mainain those libraries. Notice that there is no free
implementation of a large part of the Java standard libraries. The Ada
community hasn't produced the right libraries for web server because
there aren't many people intrested in using Ada for web serving. Write
those libraries or bindings to those libraries, and maybe that will
change. If you chose not to, that's your choice, but apparently the
reward/work ratio is not high enough for the rest of us.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"(You see, the best way to solve a problem is to rigorously define it in
terms of other people's problems and then run away quickly.)"
   -- Roland McGrath <frob@debian.org>

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[Jeff Carter]

What about Pascal Obry's Ada Web Server (AWS)?

 http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry/

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I blow my nose on you."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[tmoran]

>rather trivial to make a thin binding to a language. In others, it's
>easier to just write in the language - since GUI's probably fall in the
  As a coauthor of the TriAda paper "CLAW, a High Level, Portable,
Ada 95 Binding for Microsoft Windows", I respectfully disagree that
for a GUI it's easier to write in C.

>community hasn't produced the right libraries for web server because
>there aren't many people intrested in using Ada for web serving.
  There's a simple, basic web server using CLAW, and Pascal Obry has a
much bigger one.  (Look for "web server" at www.adapower.com).  If you
want to replace Apache I'd agree the libraries available in Ada leave
you some work to do.  But not all web servers need all that functionality.

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[Pascal Obry]

dvdeug@x8b4e516e.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner) writes:

> Not standard libraries - the only language with huge standard libraries
> on that list is Java. Eiffel, Sather, Objective-C, Pascal and Tcl (and
> Smalltalk?) also have a paucity of library support; not coincidintly,
> Eiffel, Objective-C, Pascal, Tcl and Ada all have decent support for
> binding to C routines, at least in modern implementations. (I'm not
> familiar with Sather or Smalltalk in this regard.) In some cases, it's
> rather trivial to make a thin binding to a language. In others, it's
> easier to just write in the language - since GUI's probably fall in the
> second group, it's good that GTKAda exists. 
> 
> The big problem with a large library collection for Ada is that it takes
> work to write and mainain those libraries. Notice that there is no free

> implementation of a large part of the Java standard libraries. The Ada
> community hasn't produced the right libraries for web server because
> there aren't many people intrested in using Ada for web serving. Write
> those libraries or bindings to those libraries, and maybe that will
> change. If you chose not to, that's your choice, but apparently the
> reward/work ratio is not high enough for the rest of us.

Well that's not true. I have since a long time done Web developement in Ada.
My current environment is AdaCGI (from David Weller) and Template_Parser (from
me, available from my homepage). Both packages used together are already
really convenient to build nice Web server (speaking from experience here).

One of them as been presented to Ada france (WORM - for Web Organizer and
Research Machine). A distributed project to reference URL with comments, notes
and some others data. All this with a search engine (vector based and not
boolean based)... The search engine is capable to search on multiple WORM
databases, each database can be in whatever platforms (yes all the CGI are
built with GLADE)... Anyway this is an Intranet project!

So I repeat everything needed to do CGI based Web server is there.

And soon I will try to swith to AWS (Ada Web Server - available from my
homepage) as the base of my Web development. I expect to have WORM ported to
AWS (as I think it is mature enough now) to test it on a real application.
I let you know...

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[Pascal Obry]

Jeff Carter <jrcarter@acm.org> writes:

> What about Pascal Obry's Ada Web Server (AWS)?
> 
>  http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry/

Thanks for the plug :)

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[tmoran]

>But if a preexisting binding did not exist,
  But the binding *does* exist.

>effort went into writing CLAW, a lot more effort than could be justified
>if you just wanted to write one program with a graphical interface.
  Is the cost of buying or creating a substantial binding like CLAW
more or less than the discounted cost of a series of small
investments in doing "just a coupla more API calls" in C?  If you
see little demand in the future, it would indeed be foolish to
invest in something you won't need.

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[David Emery]

In general, I've found that the money invested in a quality
Ada binding (strongly typed, modular, etc) is easily returned
in avoiding/detecting errors at the point of the interface. 
This is true both due to the fact that the interface is both
between parts of the program and also different programmers
(e.g. the style arguments on this newsgroup), and also between
possibly two design styles.  

On one project, 8 weeks total, 5 programmers (40 staff-weeks), 1
staff-week spent doing the binding, we figure that we saved 2 or 3
staff-weeks worth of debugging.  As we implemented about 1/7 of the
total system for this prototype, we extrapolated another 14 
staff-weeks of savings due to the binding.  In reality, after a 
while you'd stop making mistakes, but I could project easily a
5-1 return on investment for the binding over the total development
of the project.
               dave

Re: why Ada not used much in commercial server side development

[tmoran]

>In general, I've found that the money invested in a quality
>Ada binding (strongly typed, modular, etc) is easily returned
  An opportunity for a post that pertains to the subject of a message,
and also to the "Subject:" of the message!
  There is a newly released Introductory version of Claw, which includes
sockets and thus supports Smplsrvr (www.adapower.com/reuse/clawweb.html).
The source code is downloadable, for $0, from www.rrsoftware.com.