Re: Web Development Using Ada?

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <jacob@jacob-sparre.dk>]

Michael Erdmann wrote:

> Hallo Jacob; interesting idea; your commercial application is running
> on a server farm?

It is still under development.  But yes, we are planning to have
multiple instances running on different servers.  You should note that
our reason for having multiple instances is not performance, but rather
an extra layer of security (separation of different customers), so we
are not going to use the DSA.

> But this exactly what i mean: The attitude that i can do almost
> everything in Ada which is currently already done by some other
> technology in the market; sure that's possible but to what price.

So far the cost of the web part of the application has been
insignificant compared with the cost of the actual business logic.  I
can't give you exact numbers, but the costs differ by roughly one order
of magnitude.

> More Specifically; Is the DSA based framework already existing and 
> applied by a larger community to Web development that e.g. Jay Chan 
> could use it?

I simply don't get this "framework" infatuation.  If you write your
system with distribution in mind, the only extra source text you need to
make a distributed version of the system is the configuration
information for your compiler's DSA implementation.  What do the
frameworks you have in mind provide that AWS + DSA doesn't provide
as-is?

Also; AWS consistently beats node.js, which supposedly is the fastest
existing web framework (http://wiki.ada-dk.org/aws_vs_node.js).  Testing
AWS or node.js against other web frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails shows
orders of magnitude speed differences.  So you have to have quite heavy
applications or quite large user bases to actually need more than one
server for performance.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"Very small. Go to sleep" - monster (not drooling)