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G-WAN, Another Free Web Server

Posted by kdawson on from the dioing-it-in-a-hundred-k dept.

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."

16 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  2. Help me out here by TimHunter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Help me out here by Draek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      how many of todays Perl and PHP website scripting security issues would evaporate if the authors were forced to write in a less flexible language that took a few moments to actually compile before being enabled?

      None. Contrary to popular belief, lower-level languages don't make shitty programmers competent.

      --
      No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
    2. Re:Help me out here by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But those lower level programmers are not getting the experience that turns them into good programmers. They're cutting and pasting bad code and propagating errors which are nightmarish to track down after the fact. And yes, I'm trusting the language designer to write a good _compiler_ to write small utilities, well written, rather than presenting every programmer with that stunning mass of debris I find coming out of places like CPAN.

      We should not resist new tools for good programmers. We should resist toolboxes that include that many slightly different hammers, many of which are liable to break and many of which have handles likely to slip in the grip of a normal user, sending a large and spinning object flying towards anyone working near them. I'm afraid I've been that person near them and struck with those handles too many times in the last five years, and from observation, far too many of the scripting language authors need to go back and be _mentored_ in how to do efficient or even safe code, because they certainly didn't learn it dealing with Perl.

      For examples of the insanity, I'll point you directly to mod_perl itself and resolving which versions of mod_perl itself are compatible with your project. Though that utility was written in C, it has to deal with a lot of Perl's vagaries, and it can be very awkward to coordinate multiple old and new Perl utilities with a single mod_perl release.

  3. Re:Spite? by zblack_eagle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know how writing a web server that requires a Microsoft OS exactly hits them "where it hurts"

  4. Re:Big Plus! by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    --
    Find free books.
  5. The real question... by amirulbahr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:The real question... by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The question is WHY THE FUCK DID IT MAKE SLASHDOT?

      Numerous people on this site have loudly proclaimed "Alternatives are great!!!" and have had their comments modded up for it.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

    2. Re:The real question... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      C'mon. Whenever some new Linux distribution (or variant on an existing distro) is announced, it automatically becomes a Slashdot submission. Why should it be any different with new web servers?

      Of course, whenever we have those HIGYALD (Hey, I've Got Yet Another Linux Distro) stories, there is always at least one post similar to yours, asking why it's news. And there's always at least one response to that post, explaining that alternatives are great - which is true here as well, so the circle is now complete.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
  6. Re:Okay, is it just me by timmarhy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    let me see.

    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....
  7. Re:10. subnet? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Big Plus! by BlitzTech · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  9. On the plus side ... by devloop · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Finally a platform with built-in buffer overflow support!

    Let the exploits games begin!

  10. Re:Big Plus! by jfim · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Jean-Francois Im's blog
  11. Re:It can't even talk http properly by Phroggy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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;
  12. Re:Big Plus! by Toonol · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.