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There's also AOLserver, which runs on multiple platforms.

They DID produce one really awesome open source web server (if you're one of the few Tcl/Tk fanboys out there). It's still quietly maintained by the open source community, and recently ported to the iPhone.

Yeah, irrelevant to 99.5% of slashdot.

This does this mean that the new split off and to be aquired AOL divsion and the community will finally stop using the open source AOLserver with its embedded TCL support. Its used on a number of core AOL sites and also supported by OpenACS.

There is a large ISP in the US called AOL, which runs on a web server called AOLserver, which is now open source software. The web server makes extensive use of Tcl. Many other large sites use PHP. So, you can make it scale if you want to (although this may involve mixing in some C code).

Does it scale as well as Java? Perhaps not. The point is that it's easier to get started with the scripting language, though. Your customers probably had an easier time of it getting started with scripting rather than diving into some complex, difficult to implement Java solution. In some cases, I know I wouldn't have had any customers at all if they had had to start out with C or Java rather than a scripting language, which was easy enough that they could at least implement their idea to the point where it made money - and then they could pay me to fix up their code and make it faster, more elegant, and so on.

In any case, what's interesting to me is the range of scaling - Java does pretty well if you consider the high end, but not so well at the low end. Some scripting language systems don't scale up well enough. The best things start out pretty easy and will grow with you a long way before you have to go implement the big hairy memory intensive Java thing though.

I do agree with you WRT the speed thing... JITing stuff seems to be a pretty good solution.

T - 32 seconds before the flames start.

http://aolserver.com/

From the project's page:

"AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server. AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server used for large scale, dynamic web sites."

Interestingly enough, AOL could monopolize the instant messenging market overnight. AOL has a patent on instant messaging as well as chat rooms. They could shut down every other service and people would literally be forced to use them or live without AIM, MSM, YIM, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, etc... This is all entirely within their legal rights too. Thank god they have been pretty good to the community despite all the bad stuff people say about them. They produce a linux version of aim (admittedly somewhat crippled), give us an open source highly scalable web server, they gave us mozilla, winamp, one version of a basic p2p infastructue, and all other kinds of amazing contriubtions. Personally I don't think people give them enough credit. In addition to those other things, millions use AOL and AOL is very effective at blocking spam both in and out, and also stopping viruses dead in their tracks. They don't take any shit from anyone and although it may anger some web masters and system administrators, perhaps a "no mercy" policy should be more commonplace. Its damn effective and gets those in charge of mail servers to open there eyes and pay attention. Thats why I still have my parents using AOL. That and they do provide some pretty cool media services.
Regards,
Steve

they want to make sure everyone is nice and compliant about upgrading when they decide to take httpd over to java like all the other java kool-aid they are selling --- Maven is Jonestown, lets all program in XML because its standard! Cultures breakdown when there is too little disent and questioning of authority, the apache foundtion is headed in that direction.

Lets move on, SOA and all that, most people don't need any of this mod_* crap and could use:
thttpd he has other servers there, too and http_load.
lighttpd I'm moving to this sweet little server for most apps and the home site runs ea php and ruby on rails
AOLServer like OpenACS runs on
Boa
fnord from our boy who did the (in)famous benchmarks
Cherokee I root for this one for some reason.
gatling
cthulhu
yaws in erlang, should support more simul. connections than the unlying OS can support.
dhttpd
Litespeed check out their php benchmarks
thy
roxen
mini-httpd never tried this one
xitami I have a intranet server running for 5 yrs (without upgrading xitami) on xitami Solaris, simple, small, easy to admin, never dies max uptime was 1000 days+.
eddiefor complex load bal and geographic distribution
hiawatha

And for the love of god, please at least design your sites to get their images from images.mysite.com if possible so that you can use a non-bloatware web server to server the images, reserving horsepower on your apache server for stuff that actually _requires_ some features of apache.

http://www.hcsw.org/awhttpd/ updated on 12-06-2004
http://www.norz.org/zawhttpd.html
http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html

[paste from first google result for "aolserver"]

AOLserver
What is AOLserver. AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server. ... Site Search.
Latest News. AOLserver 4.0.8 released. dossy - Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:51:27 GMT ...
http://www.aolserver.com/

BTW, AOL.COM runs on Solaris 8/AOLserver 3.something. From what I've heard, AOLserver is supposed to be reasonably secure and robust.

Anyway, my point is that sometimes they DO release stuff, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that they'll eventually opensource AIM as well, especially since it's long since "not just for AOLers anymore".

Netscape released the Mozilla source, not AOL. It was already open source by the time they bought it, so they don't get credit for releasing it.

On the other hand, they did open source AOLserver, so they're actually somewhat friendly to the idea (surprisingly).

The official website is at www.aolserver.com

Considering the speed improvements in both the interpreters for these languages, and general processors, I'm suprised more network services (smtp, web, ftp) aren't being written either entirely in these languages, or with a mixture of scripting and native C modules for the areas that need better performance.

There's a few examples that I've seen out there that already do this, like Zope and Aolserver (i think). Of course, this approach may only eliminate one type of vulnerability, and still leaves other things like these that appeared for Zope at the beginning of the year.

I would be very interested to see what this could mean for the fate of AOLServer. AOLServer is AOL's open source server that they have maintained as OSS despite the tide of naysayers when they acquired it. I, for one, would be very amused to see MS maintain an open source project, but realistically, acquisition would likely mean replacing this, and any other non-MS software with their MS "equivalents".

How many of those operating systems use Apache?

You mean including Windows, all of them can, but there are fare more webservers available for Unix like systems than there are for Windows. Thttpd, wn, Thy, Roxen, Fnord, Dhttpd, Caudium, Bozotic, Boa, and AOLserver are all available in Debian in addition to Apache. Most of these are IPv6, ssl/tls, and cgi capable. They all have their strengths, and they all are being actively maintained. Most of these will operate as a drop-in replacement for Apache for most sites.

You are correct that most of the web servers on the net are Apache installations of one type or another. Most sites do not need or use all of the features that Apache offers, but install Apache anyway. Sound familiar? They are still thinking in traditional market terms, instead of looking at what is available to them. They treating Unix as if it were Windows, but if an cross-platform Apache-specific worm were to affect them adversely, there will be alternatives available to them that they would not have on Windows.

The point is that Unix like operating systems offer greater variety of more services in more implementations than Windows does or ever will. There is more room for fault tolerance, more methods available, and more capability to find new solutions to new and old problems (including security) in Free Software than any company or group of companies is capable of providing.

• 
  AOL ServerThe Sophisticated One.
  ApacheThe One We All Know and Love.
  BoaThe Fastest One.
  WNThe Indexed One.
  

AOL doesn't run Apache, it runs AOLserver.

The solution would be to load the DOM in the backend and have front-end applications access it.

You could try using AOLserver as a multi-threaded web server and tDOM as your DOM processor.

I agree very much with Randolpho's post. Ditch PHP if you really want an elegent architecture. If you really need to stick with PHP, try out Midgard. Otherwise, you really ought to at least look at the alternatives. Zope and OpenACS are probably the best open source web application systems/environments/architectures, whatever you want to call it. I prefer OpenACS (there's just something about using a system that was built primarily by highly intelligent MIT and CalTech alumni...).

OpenACS is based on AOLServer (probably the best, and first application-oriented web server out there, which was GPL'd by AOL thanks to Phil Greenspun's nagging. it's multi-threaded, it has database pooling, a healthy set of modules/plugins, and a wonderful community.), Tcl (you'll get used to it, really ;), and either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Thought it was designed for use with Oracle, and was ported to PostgreSQL, the architecture in OpenACS permits you to easily swap in support for other databases. Though, you'd have an extremely tough time getting it to work in MySQL as it relies on numerous high-end and complex relational databases features, most of which MySQL does not support.

OpenACS is highly modular, built entirely out of smaller packages, with its own package management system. There is a core package, the ACS Kernel, ACS Tcl (which contains most of the utility code, etc.), and there are various packages built on top of that which provide both specific application functionality, but also services that other packages can use. The documentation is built into the code and is available online in every OpenACS installation. Higher up packages include web page creation, bulletin board systems, blogging, content management, etc. You can "mount" these packages at various locations in the site map for your web site / application. E.g., you could mount an instance of the bulletin board at mysite.com/forum, and add a second one at mysite.com/techsupport. You can create subsites, such as mysite.com/internal/. There is an extensive and incredibly powerful permissions system so you can completely control access to every part of your system. There is also a built-in templating system which provides a simple separation between logic and display code, as well as theming capabilities.

I'm sure there's a lot that I've neglected to mention here. But I think you can get the point. OpenACS is a very mature platform that's be in development and production for many years now (hell, take a look at what Ars Digita was able to accomplish, they were making millions selling this system, and they gave the code away for free under the GPL). Don't take my word for it, go to the website and read about it. The only drawback to it that I see is that it does have a high learning curve. It took me a few months of reading and experimenting with it to really understand how the system works, but it's definitely worth it. There are a few hosting providers out there (Acorn Hosting and Zill.net) that offer affordable hosting packages, but it's also easy to setup your own server. OpenACS also has the ability to run multiple server boxes in a load balanced environment, so if you need to scale out, you can. Oh yeah, this is also a descendant of the same ACS system that RedHat's Enterprise Applications are descended from (RedHat got that technology when they bought the remains of ArsDigita.

This is because they use AOLserver which is a massively scaleable and powerful web application server. Some of its features are:

• Multi-threaded - It's been multi-threaded since its original development in 94 or 95.
  
• Native DB API and DB connection pooling
  
• Embedded scripting language, which is Tcl, which allows for extremely fast development. It also allows for .ADP pages, like .ASP, .JSP or .PSP pages.
  

The reason Tcl is the embedded language is that AOLserver was developed in the early nineties, when Tcl was the hot new language. If the system were to be developed today, I'm sure that the developers would have chosen Python, Perl or some other more buzzword compliant language that has a strong following.

That being said, Tcl in AOLserver still rocks for developing DB backed websites. In fact, the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) is a complete web toolkit for building just these kinds of sites. The Sloan School of Management at MIT recently funded the development of an open source course management system called dotLRN that is build using the OpenACS as its foundation.

So Tcl isn't just a GUI tool or a glue language. It's also a great language for web scripting!

talli

Some of the largest sites in the world use Tcl almost exclusively, including AOL.com, Netscape.com and Mapquest.com. They use it because it is the embedded scripting language in the web app server AOLserver.

So yes, it is used quite heavily.

talli

Yes. For one, OpenACS toolkit (and a lot of on-line communities built on it) uses it. TCL is a native language of AOLServer.

I would have liked to have at least seen Tcl listed in the "why we didn't choose X" section, as there are a lot of good reasons to use it, that jive very nicely with the reasons he gives for using PHP. AOL
uses Tcl in their (free software) web server, for instance. There is also the stuff (disclaimer - I work on it) at:

tcl.apache.org

There are reasons not to use it, too, but it's a pity that it wasn't even investigated.

I currently have to implement a DotLRN (.lrn) site which is based on OpenACS.

But anyway, OpenACS is the reworked version of ACS (which stands for 'Asomething' Community System) that was written for Oracle and AOLserver.

OpenACS is written in TCL, specifically for PostgreSQL and AOLserver.

I don't like TCL that much, but at least it works

AOLServer - an open source, production quality and high performance web server.

Don't forget about AOLserver, AOL's GPL multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server.

Zeus really is great, it has some wonderful clustering features too, admin for the whole cluster can be done from one place. At the very least it's worth taking a look at the 30-day trial version to get an idea for how much work it would be to port the scripts across.

On a large site, you'll quite likely save the license cost by the decreased use of resources.

(AOLServer is a good server too, though it doesn't have the nice admin of Zeus there's a lot it can do and is also very efficient. I'm not sure whether it can throttle bandwidth by itself though).

But processes as provided by current operating systems are too expensive to use. If I have a network server (e.g. a httpd) that has to create a process for each network request, it will never scale. In theory all that has to happen is inetd (or equivalent) fork/execs and does the necessary plumbing so that the ends of the socket are STDIN and STDOUT. Then the process just reads and writes as necessary to fulfil the request. In practice, this just doesn't work.

That's why you can't use cgi for high-volume transactions. So lets make the server a single multithreaded daemon process instead, where each request is handled by a thread. Now you can handle each request much faster, but you lose the protected address space the OS gives you in a process.

Obviously, the OS needs to change, and give use something (maybe a hybrid between processes and threads) that more closely meets applications needs. I don't see anybody making suggestions as to ways to move forward. Anybody know of research in this area?

multi-threading is why, for example aolserver can do with one process what apache needs a bunch of processes to do. (though i digress, aolserver only has to run tcl interps, where apache is much more versatile.)

meanwhile, both FreeBSD and NetBSD are trying to get SMP and scheduler activations into their kernels. this would improve their support for multi-threading substantially. there's a paper which explains this better than i ever could.

There is no need for a web server to be running anything [on an open port] other than Apache.

What about Roxen? What about AOLserver? What about the hypothetical future complete rewrite of IIS? And what about Other?

is adopting a lot of open source practices (Mozilla)

You mean "Netscape". You think AOL had _anything_ to do with the open-sourcing of Mozilla? Ha!

Maybe he meant Netscape/Mozilla, but a better example would be AOLServer, the open-source server that AOL runs on.

As I'm sure most /. readers know, the webserver core of GNN is now known as AOLserver. It's open sourced under the MPL and it's actually a pretty darned interesting hunk of Unix application code.

Personally, I do not care for the way that AOL tries to make their dial-up customers dependant on them. The browser brokenness that their customers and many webmasters have to endure ("AOL customers click here...") would probably not persist if AOL didn't lock less-savy users in the way that they do.

But they have dumped a bunch of money into some very cool stuff and have set it free with an astonishingly small number of strings attached, and I for one have trouble not being thankful for that much.

Don't expect AOL to write free programs

Really?

But they've still got a lot of NS server software available for use at some point, if they can find a good use.

Don't forget AOL Server, which I understand has some advantages over Apache (faster, works well with databases, built around Tcl if that's what floats your boat) and is open source (Mozilla Public License, apparently). Never used it myself, but AOL does.

AOLserverruns big parts of aol.com and digitalcity.com. Say what you may about the quality of AOL's services, but when was the last time you heard of either of those websites going down? Or getting hacked?

AOLserverruns big parts of aol.com and digitalcity.com. Say what you may about the quality of AOL's services, but when was the last time you heard of either of those websites going down? Or getting hacked?

AOL doesn't buy all the cool stuff. Apple bought NeXT. I'm a long time AOL and Mac hater, but I find myself liking some of the stuff they've bought! Time magazine &co. is still crap though. When AOL/TW buys the Economist, the world is about to end.

Of course it survived a /.ing; it's running AOLserver.

Hell, why not, they open sourced their web server and it's one of the best around (IMO, better than Apache).

And don't even think about pointing me in this [aolserver.com] direction.

Yeah, make sure you don't show this clown any evidence to contradict his opinion. He can't handle it. I wouldn't think of it.

They support great projects like Mozilla, open sourced an excellent webserver, but play hardball over AIM.

If AOL wants to prove their commitment to open standards, then publish the AIM protocol under a royalty-free license. Be willing to put their money where their mouth is.

On one hand, there's their open-source webserver.

On the other hand, they have disgusting, slimy tentacles (and I don't mean the good kind of tentacles, either), like Cthulhu, but more commercial.

(Offtopic, why the hell does Slashdot add a / after news: when you try to link to a newsgroup? Just plain news: should link to a group on whatever newsfeed you've got handy, and news:// can take you to a group on a different news server (I think), but news:/ doesn't work at all. Oh well. The joke is intact anyway, I guess.)

I've got the karma to burn, so let me just don my "Captain Obvious" hat here...

America Online? Open standards? You're joking, right?

I seriously doubt that I need to explain myself here.

And don't even think about pointing me in this direction.

i know, i know, rtfm, but does apache 2.x still serve pages by forking a new process (i know, it preforks, blah blah, still you end up with dozens of processes)? until apache is a multithreaded server like AOLServer (don't laugh, it's open source and very, very good) or even a non-blocking IO server like thttpd it is just unusable for truly scalable or database-centric stuff. i love all the mods for apache, and would love the apache API to evolve to a single process, advanced server instead of the 'patchy' mess on top of NCSA it started as.

for background on why things like non-blocking IO or multithreaded instead of forking is good, check out thttpd's section on non-blocking io or Philip Greenspun's own Introduction to AOLServer, part 1.

-sam

Saying they contribute nothing is a bit unfair.

Also, AOL has actually released a few other Open Source applications. Take a look at AOLserver for instance.

AOL isn't my favorite company, but they aren't all bad all the time :)

Remember AOL owns Netscape, which helps to bring us Mozilla. They also have sponsor AOLServer, an open soruce web server. I'm no AOL fan but give some credit where credit is due.

An un-split Microsoft has no choice but to use IIS. How much faith would you have in the Apache Project if their Jakarta team, for instance, switched their home page over to IIS or AOLserver?

Many pundits and observers believed that Microsoft would be more profitable split than whole. Why? Because the two (or three) BabySofts would not need to promote each others' products, and they would still not be in competition with each other. Currently the IIS offering hurts the Hailstorm group because they are not free to choose the best, most secure product(s) to run their system. Bad for billg, good for the Hailstorm detractors.

-sting3r

MS may *say* they own 95% of the server market, but they are *lying*.

They may very well be correct. Economists define "market share" along the lines of "fraction of the total amount of money spent by consumers in return for products," excluding software available for no charge such as AOLserver and Apache HTTP Server. Microsoft's IIS is the most popular HTTP (etc.) server software that's not at least free as in beer, and it may very well have over 90 percent of that market.

(God I hate having to defend Microsoft!) Properly configured, IIS runs as a user other than the administrator, and scripts under IIS run as yet-another-non-administrator user. This is one step ahead of how most Apache installations are run.

Still, I'd rather run AOLserver.

What about AOLServer, which was released under the GPL (I believe), thanks to a lot of work by Philip Greenspun and the folks at Ars Digita?

-Dan