This article originally appeared at:
http://www.byte.com/nntp/networking?comment_id=1271
> What you propose would be slow. You can program in BASIC if you want. Just > don't expect great performance. As the goal of programming is, increasingly, the production of network services, I think the performance equation is being rewritten in some ways. Consider Web app servers -- Zope, Vignette StoryBoard, etc. These things are programmed in Python and Tcl, respectively, so you'd expect them to be slow. But in the context of a long-running daemon process that handles HTTP requests and serves up data, it turns out that the implementation language matters less than architectural issues, such as caching. I interviewed a user of Bluestone's Sapphire/Web recently. His company built a "mission-critical" intranet groupware app on this platform. Even though they had the option, in Sapphire/Web, to literally toggle between Java and C++, they chose to leave their app logic in Java. Why? When they monitored the app logic, it hardly made the meter flicker. The real work was happening in the connection processing, and in the database processing. I claim that the vast majority of new programming that needs to be done is in the middleware layer. It's business logic, it runs plenty fast enough for practical purposes when written in script, and it changes too rapidly not to be written in script. -- Jon Udell | http://udell.roninhouse.com/ | 603-355-8980