Re: how to make Ada more popular?

[Al Christians <achrist@easystreet.com>]

bill_1@nospam.com wrote:
> 
> 
> Now, if a web server can be written in Ada, and GPL'ed and become famouse
> for quality, speed, etc.., this is one way to make Ada more known, as many
> pepole and ISP's, will download it, with source, and install it, use it, etc..
> 

Bill,

OK, I'll brainstorm with you, but don't expect a downpour. 

See _The_Innovator's_Dilemma_ by Christensen: a new product has to be
worse in some way than its established competitors to succeed.  How can 
we make a web server worse than the ones we already have?  How about
having it receive requests and serve up data by email?  Terrible,
right?  
Not always, for example:

1. How about guys like me who don't want to buy a server and our ISP's
charge too much for disk at their place?  Suppose we want to offer
services that the ISP won't support.  By email, running in background on
our desktop would be fine.  ISP email provides a queue for requests when 
I'm off-line.  But, like many others, I've got a separate POTS line for
my computer, so that's maybe not too often.  

2. Cable-modem and ADSL:  this is the real growth possibility. ADSL is 
the approximately 1 megabit/second service to be available to just about 
everyone in the next few years.  In some parts of the country it costs 
no more  than a regular phone line, maybe 2 or 3 times as much in
others.   
It's coming, eventually, and it requires a dedicated line (to an ISP for 
all us work-at-home people).  You get an IP address, but the ISP won't 
let you run a server at the home end of the ADSL connection if you are 
just paying for internet access.  How they prohibit this is probably not 
all worked out, but maybe they change the IP address on you sometimes 
when you least expect it, etc.  Some kind of an install-it-at-home
server 
that provides features of a server from home over an ADSL, cable modem,
or even ordinary dial-up account in a way that ISP's will not prevent/
disallow would be a lot of fun. It would have to be easy to set up and 
high-reliability to succeed in that environment.

Some other internet-related software-related business ideas possibly 
worth hopping on:

1. Look at www.webridge.com.  This is customized user-specific internet 
content management aimed at companies over $100 million, all using MS 
tools. Can Ada help beat that on reliability, which they advertise as 
an important feature?  Can Ada reduce costs to develop something for
companies under $100 million (using Linux, etc)?

2.  Look at www.zope.org.  This is python-based web application 
platform, open source.  Find some places where Ada can add value to
this package.  (Python is great, honest -- it's just not strongly-typed 
and runs slower than anything else, so there must be some places in
there where another language like Ada might help out).

Al