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

[Pascal Obry <p.obry@wanadoo.fr>]

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.

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--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
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