Re: Ada based web applications ( was JGnat support...)

["Hans-Olof Danielsson" <Hans-Olof.Danielsson@swipnet.se>]

"Ingo Marks" <adv@region-nord.de> wrote:
>
> I don't think it's a clever idea just to imitate the JDK.
>
> An Ada based solution must provide far better features than J2EE and .NET
> to make Ada attractive to developers.
>
> The current big problems Java and .NET suffer is performance. We all know
> that Java is pretty slow compared to C++ and Ada. AFAIK Microsoft has the
> same problem with .NET. Here it's not the C# compiler (they have a good
JIT
> compiler for it) but the very slow XML based webservices. In one computer
> journal MS recently recommended NOT to use .NET based webservices. XML is
> based on top of HTTP and that on TCPIP, so there is much overhead.
>
> Ada provides good networking and tasking capabilities. There exist an Ada
> based webserver (AWS) which you can compile your own Ada applications
into,
> so that you don't have CGI overhead and compilation overhead (as PHP,
Perl,
> MSIL etc. suffer). With Adas tasking capabilities it should be possible to
> write network "task" based web applications instead of page (session)
based
> like CGI. Currently you have the choice to use CGI (with C, C++ etc.) or
> script based server modules (mod_php, mod_perl for Apache, for example).
> They are all "paged based", that means they must use sessions to recover
> all user data between page hits (for Java there exists another event based
> solution). My idea is, that in Ada you could use tasks instead of sessions
> or events. For every user a "session task" would be started which surveys
> the user's actions and handle his requests. That way, even realtime
> behaviour would be possible with Ada based web applications. I haven't
> heard about any realtime features in Java oder .NET so far.
>
> Because Ada has standardized compilers (GNAT) for many platforms (Windows,
> Linux, BSD, MacOSX, Sun etc.), AWS could run on several platforms and make
> binary data exchange between different AWS possible. I have played a
little
> bit with AWS, it seems not to be pretty stable yet, but it could be
> enhanced.
>
> The advantages of Ada based web applications are evident:
>
> - webserver integrated Ada applications (no CGI overhead, no compilation
> overhead)
> - binary data transfer between different AWS platforms (no XML overhead)
> - session tasks survey user actions and allow proper actions within given
> time restrictions
> - better security (due to Ada features (no buffer overflows etc.))
>
> could result to more powerful and much faster solutions than both J2EE
> and.NET.

It might be of value to have a look at
http://conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/FrontPage and the link
from there to "Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture"
to get a good foundation for the thoghts on webserver integrated Ada
applications. ( eg No cookies! No frames! )

Hans-Olof