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Believing in what you sell...
OK, so this is deliberately provocative. A challenge, in fact. I went
over this evening to
http://www.netcraft.co.uk/cgi-bin/Survey/whats
to find out what web-servers the major LISP vendors actually run
themselves.
Answers?
www.harlequin.com is running Netscape-Commerce/1.12
www.franz.com is running Apache/1.1.1
www.expertelligence.com is running WebBase 4.10 build 54 BETA.
(which isn't surprising because WebBase is one of their products)
www.digitool.com is running NCSA/1.3.
Netcraft found cl-http running on just 27 of 739688 web sites, a tiny
proportion. Of these, 11 were in .com domains:
www2.banned-books.com
www2.commodity-exchange.com
www2.consumers-report.com
www2.education-resources.com
www2.freethought.com
interaction.in-progress.com
www2.jordan-maxwell.com
www.se1.com
www2.synergy-enterprises.com
www2.truth-seeker.com
www2.truthseeker.com
On investigation, though, I found that these were all actually the same
server (Synergy Enterprises, www.se1.com, 204.216.182.1, apparently a
PowerMac), with the exception of http://interaction.in-progress.com/.
Or, to put it differently, it appears that in the whole world, only two
organisations are prepared to bet their Web-sites on cl-http... both,
incidentally on Macintosh CL.
This worries the *hell* out of me. I am evaluating cl-http on UN*X,
currently with Franz Allegro 4.3. I'm frankly having some difficulty
getting it going (but mainly, I think, because I find the documentation
extremely opaque). But if I'm the only person in the world running a
commercial cl-http on UN*X? I don't mind swimming against the tide, but
that's ridiculous!
OK, guys, does **none** of you believe in the technology you're selling?
Or do you just think that cl-http is a poor Web server? Or do you find
it too hard to configure and set up? *If* I manage it, I'm going to
write some 'for dummies' documentation, because I find the existing
documentation has too high an assumed knowledge threshold for me to even
begin to understand it (hell, I've only got twelve years of professional
LISP and three years of professional Web service).
--
simon@intelligent.co.uk (Simon Brooke)
http://www.intelligent.co.uk/~simon
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