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G-WAN, Another Free Web Server
mssmss writes "Has anyone used G-WAN — a free (as in beer), supposedly fast and scalable Web server? The downside is it supports only C scripts, which the author claims is a plus since most programmers know C anyway. There is currently only a Windows release and no clear answer in their FAQs whether there would be Linux/Solaris releases. As an interesting aside, releasing a Web server while at the same time fighting a losing battle (PDF) with a large bank over a piracy claim of $200 million (the bank is alleged to have done the piracy) is quite a feat."
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Why does the world need a non-free web server that only runs on Windows when there's already plenty of free (as in speech) ones out there (http://www.apache.org/, http://www.lighttpd.net/) that run everywhere?
I don't know how writing a web server that requires a Microsoft OS exactly hits them "where it hurts"
Absolutely. What makes me especially excited about trying G-WAN is that whenever it crashes I'll have the extra fun of figuring out whether the reason it crashed was because my own C code crashed, or because the code in his web server crashed. But wait, there's more! Adding to this really enjoyable programming problem will be the extra challenge that comes with the fact that his code is closed source, so if the crash occurs inside his code, I'll be able to get in there with a debugger and spend an afternoon figuring out what happened and whether there's any way to change the data my code gives to his code so that his code won't crash crash. I can see many really enjoyable weekends ahead of me in my parents' basement, with a bowl of nachos and a liter jug of root beer. Good times!
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Only if it does something of value.
I recall a very lightweight web server that some large outfit uses to serve up images. That's it. only images. Apparently it made things speed up significantly.
I don't see G-WAN being anything special, though.
Some of the most reliable and, surprisingly, cleanest web apps that I've worked with were written in pure C, as Apache modules. But this insurance company did have the money to hire real programmers, not just scripters and web designers.
Using C helped force the developers to avoid the extreme overarchitecturing that basically every Java- or ASP.NET-based web app suffers from. The code was simple, right to the point, and left very little room for bugs to creep in.
The system was also very fast, requiring just a single web/application server to support several thousand simultaneous users. The only reason multiple web servers were used was for failover purposes.
When I first joined them, after a number of years of using Java and Perl, I thought they were fucking nuts. But after working with them for a few years, I saw first-hand that they took the correct approach. Their web apps contained significantly fewer bugs than I would've expected from a similar-sized and similar-complexity web app written in Perl or Java. They also produced code far faster than would be expected, because they didn't get bogged down in design patterns and excessive architecture and all the crap like that we see from too many Java developers. Their web apps were damn fast, even without them bothering to tune them.
There's a place for using PHP, Perl, Python, Java, Ruby and C# for web development. It's when you want to throw some shitty web sites together really quickly, without much concern about maintainability or user experience, using the shittiest and cheapest Indian outsourcing firm you can find. Otherwise, it's a better idea to use a few talented programmers and C.
Hey, look on the bright side: at least you don't have to write your scripts in asm.
If you're going to be "scripting" in C on Windows you might as well go fully compiled with IIS (free with any Windows OS you'd be running on a server) and C# (Express version also free). Get MySQL with ODBC and you're all set.
I use PHP on Apache for flexibility. If I wanted to use C I'd compile it.
Work Safe Porn
So the guy wants to write a web server to scratch an itch or something. No big deal there. The question is WHY THE FUCK DID IT MAKE SLASHDOT?
Using C as a "scripting" language. CHECK
Using C as a "scripting" language on a WEB SERVER. CHECK
Writing a non free webserver for windows only with very limited features. CHECK
yep, he's passed the "i'm crazy as a loon" test.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That would be like saying "the fifth floor is in our building, not a public street address, so this warrant is useless". I bet that would be a useful bit of precedent to establish for lots of people who are served with search warrants. Given the router information mentioned in the article, and the settings of the laptop with an address in the address space, it's unsurprising that our plaintiff was upset that those machines did not get reported or searched properly.
i C what you did there.
Yes, your anecdotal evidence clearly suggests that scripting languages have a place as sub-standard languages to design a web-enabled application. Never mind all the professional Drupal developers. Or people that use Joomla. Yeah, platforms like those two are total wastes and it would have been infinitely wiser to write it as an Apache module.
I'm baffled that you point to using C as the root reason that your developers' code had less bugs. Speed I'll concede, but not bugs. Give your guys some credit. I'll bet them using C isn't why they write good code.
Writing a website full of incomprehensible ranting about Microsoft and the computer industry, whilst claiming that releasing a[nother] free web server for their platform will "hit them where it hurts". CHECK
> software he was recommending contained over 100 bug fixes
So, did you guys replace windows, exchange, office with other products? Wait a minute...
Oops, my bad. You were talking about Joomla and Drupal. Somehow I did a mental s/Joomla/windows/g;s/Drupal/Office/g' in my head - subconsciously, I might add. And the whole time I was like - "Those bastards! The SP[123] and the freggin updates.windows.com" and not letting me shut down my computer without applying patches every other day (or so it seems)... But you're right. I googled a bit for a list of all the bugs for Windows and Office and couldn't find it. Occams Razor: there are none! That's professional! The Drupal/Joomla punks have the bugs listed on their OWN website!! How amateur!!
Finally a platform with built-in buffer overflow support!
Let the exploits games begin!
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Web Servers Feed @ Feed Distiller
Finding where a program crashed is way easier than finding a logic error, and those can occur in any language. Actually, debugging crashes can lead to discovery of certain kinds of logic and/or runtime errors that would be difficult to find if your runtime environment is protecting you from ever seeing a crash (heaven forbid).
Except when your non-protected runtime doesn't crash and instead overwrites the stack, corrupts the malloc arena or writes to a dangling pointer causing corruption in a completely unrelated part of the program. Hours and hours of fun!
One of the most important thing that managed programming languages brought is the fact that other parts of the program can't corrupt the system enough to make things undebuggable and that an error in a module is self-contained enough that it can't trample other parts of the program due to a memory error.
I do agree though that C and other unmanaged languages should still be taught.
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Only very few people can do string processing in C. Actually I believe more people can do string processing in assembler than in C, as with assembler you see where the problems are whereas C makes you believe it has some kind of string support.
Oh geez. He's returning Error 404 when a script crashes? That means he can't be bothered to find the list of HTTP status codes, because if he did he'd see that 404 is clearly the wrong choice. It also means he can't be bothered to look at other implementations, because then he'd have noticed that popular servers such as Apache and IIS return Error 500 when scripts are broken.
From this we can conclude that he probably hasn't read the HTTP protocol specification (because it'd be hard to read the spec but miss the list of status codes), and he has no idea how current servers work (so instead of copying their good ideas, he'll be reinventing his own broken wheels).
And from THAT we can conclude that his browser is a steaming pile of crap. The reason it's not open source is probably because he's afraid that somebody would read his code and make fun of him for it.
Heh, check out the actual 404 error message - it's malformed HTML 2.0! If you're going to go to the trouble of including a DOCTYPE declaration, you ought to at least validate the code.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
In response, I opened up a web browser, and found the changelogs for the most recent releases of the stable versions of PHP and Drupal. In front of management, I asked him to explain why stable versions (some of these stable releases were several years old, too) of the software he was recommending contained over 100 bug fixes.
That's crazy. I think that consultant dodged a bullet by avoiding having to work with you guys.