Re:AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server
by systems on Friday April 21, 2023 @01:21AM
(#35650045)
what are they (flightaware) using now
Re:AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server
by evilotto on Friday April 21, 2023 @03:43AM
(#35650862)
There's still a few .rvt links on the site, so they may still be using a fair bit of rivet.
Re:AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server
by networked on Friday April 21, 2023 @06:12AM
(#35651760)
Thanks for creating Rivet! I use it for several separate pieces of interactive functionality on my home server, the way some may use PHP. The API is simple enough, and if you already know Tcl it doesn't take you long to get started. I especially like how easy it is to implement file uploads with ::rivet::upload.
> Tcl was... is a fantastic language for doing web development.
Except for JSON. You can't round-trip JSON through Tcl because dicts are lists are strings. There are solutions out there (https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/JSON), I even wrote a few of them, but in the end there is a fundamental impedance mismatch. It gets in the way of emitting JSON from quick hacks or the REPL because you essentially need an explicit schema.
For text-based templates, Tcl is good. I have written code to generate CSS in Tcl (once for https://www.tcl-lang.org/! -- I made it responsive) and loved how well the language fit the task.
It did less than AOLserver, but was also very lightweight and easy to integrate with Apache.
For a long time, https://flightaware.com/ used Rivet under the hood.
Tcl was... is a fantastic language for doing web development. Its flexible nature made it really good for doing template/PHP type stuff, and being pretty string friendly, you had a lot of what you needed out of the box.