Re: Web Development Using Ada?

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> Any plans for the future to add some typical Web Application Features
> like Jboss or Oracle Softwarebus (OSB) provides? Topics like redundancy 
> and scaling over a server farm are important issues. 

I would not expect AWS to handle this - specialized tools like nginx do it already and there is no reason to reinvent the wheel just to prove that you can implement the whole infrastructure in Ada. It would be a wasted effort, especially if we take into account the limited resources of the Ada web-development community.

Note also that Java-based solutions had to introduce these features quite early mostly due to the fact that they suck royally when it comes to performance and they are unable to fully benefit from the actual underlying machine power. That is, with Ada and AWS you will be able to handle *a lot* more users/connections/transactions/whatever-is-your-metrics before hitting the limits of a single, reasonably configured server. Note also that there are plenty of ways to design and scale the system further down the chain (that is, at the level of your database(s), back-end services, etc.) and the outer layers, especially the HTTP protocol, are not necessarily the most optimal place to scale up.

Some story:

Some time ago I have presented the web service implemented in AWS to my fellow Java programmer who also happens to have experience in PHP. He was literally unable to believe the performance that he has seen, as it was clearly visible that the network round-trip to the server was almost equal to the whole time that we had to wait for any operation to complete. He has never seen anything like that before.
BTW - now in his spare time he is learning AWS.

So - stop worrying about all these memcaches, scaling and Jwhatnot and just make some pilot project with AWS as a feasibility study. Most likely you will never look back. :-)

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com