Wow, someone’s still using Tcl … having dabbled in Expect and Tcl/Tk … I can say that the support for other languages is key to growing its user and developer bases. I know it’s shallow, but I would imagine that lots of people will see “C and Tcl” and not look any further.

to which, I responded:

That’s the funny thing: the scalability and elegance of AOLserver comes from its use of C and Tcl. You can compile and run PHP under AOLserver now, or use Tomcat for Java/JSP with AOLserver today, but then you’re only using AOLserver as a HTTP request processor/proxy which doesn’t get you very much benefit.

I’ve always said that “most websites are small, and for small websites, you can use just about ANY solution.” So, people build their small sites using their favorite technology (Apache with mod_perl, or PHP, or Java) and start becoming successful. They quickly try to scale up their sites, and quickly hit the first wall: poor design. Yes, most sites’ scalability problems are one of poor design, not a limiting factor of the technology. This is the abysmal “slowness” that plagues most small sites.

However, there’s a whole separate class of scalability problems that plague the larger sites. It’s the actual limiting factor of the underlying technology. I imagine that very few sites ever hit this wall, because with low-cost commodity Intel hardware and ever-increasing CPU speeds, even the lamest dog can still hunt, today. But, this limit can still be reached. And, without real scientific evidence (i.e., this is purely anecdotal), I suggest that other web technology platforms reach this limit far sooner than AOLserver does.

But, recalling the more common cause of scalability problems (poor design which plagues all platforms), it’s still not important today for most web development shops to care about their technology choices, but rather the people working with/for them. But, I’d still prefer to hedge my bets and build my applications on top of AOLserver regardless, so that when the day finally comes, I’ll be able to continue to scale it when others can’t.