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Roxen was definitely far easier to use than Apache, but PHP was a second-class citizen on Roxen, and "Roxen including RXML and Pike" was directly competing with

Roxen was definitely far easier to use than Apache, but PHP was a second-class citizen on Roxen, and "Roxen including RXML and Pike" was directly competing with "Apache plus mod_php" (and/or ColdFusion? I never used that, so not sure) though I don't know that the creators understood that at that time. There were a number of contributions to Roxen's oblivion, to include RXML was a very high level XML-based scripting language, but you had to drop to Pike to do some things; PHP was a single language that was clunkier than Pike but didn't seem like two separate languages to learn. Since Roxen started so early, there was some terminological divergence already in 2000 between it and the rest of the webserver world. Roxen created a 2.x of the web server and RXML syntax that was notably nicer and more modern-seeming, but also much slower for some use cases, so some Roxen 1.x users resisted upgrading -- so much so that when the company gave up, the community-maintained Roxen, Caudium, was based on 1.x, not 2.x, even though 2.x had been out for many years. From the outside perspective, Roxen seemed to treat consulting or enterprise sales as its bread and butter, in which the webserver was a sort of force multiplier or secret sauce, which directly conflicted with a goal of growing the Roxen user community.

em-bee 4y ago
I don't know that the creators understood that at that time yes, this is right, this was not well understood. part of the problem was that the concept of web development frameworks was not established yet. later it would have been easier to say that roxen competes with frameworks such as django or rails, but at the time roxen was promoted as a webserver, and so people expected a drop-in replacement for apache. in fact, roxen might have done better if it had been using apache as a http protocol frontend. in a sense roxen/pike suffers the same challenge as smalltalk and lisp do today. you can do powerful things in those languages and environments, but they don't fit into the mold of what everyone else was doing. you kind of have to give up your existing ecosystem and start from scratch learning new tools and concepts. RXML was a very high level XML-based scripting language, but you had to drop to Pike to do some things; PHP was a single language that was clunkier than Pike but didn't seem like two separate languages to learn. i wouldn't see it that way. anyone who learned programming could see that html/xml/rxml was not a programming language but sophisticated markup. for some time there were two camps, those that wanted code and markup mixed in one file, and those that wanted to keep it separate. php favored the mixed approach and python went for the latter. roxen with pike also was firmly in the latter camp. however it seems that it took a while before the latter approach became more popular and by that time multiple alternatives such as python and ruby were available. Caudium, was based on 1.x, not 2.x, even though 2.x had been out for many years. i was part of that team. the primary issue was not performance, but compatibility. roxen 2 could not handle some of the more complex rxml people had created with roxen 1. the most notable reaction i remember that per hedbor, the primary developer of roxen, was disappointed that we had forked roxen 1 and not roxen 2. he was understandably and rightfully proud of his work. but unfortunately it took some time before roxen 2 was able to achieve enough compatibility with roxen 1 to make a lot of old rxml work in roxen 2. another notable detail is that the fork was lead by his very brother david. and for the curious, the name caudium came from us looking up the word "fork" in a latin dictionary. we didn't find a nice sounding translation, but there was this reference of a roman town near a river-fork whose name we all liked, so that is what we picked.
- randallsquared 4y ago
  Hey, thanks for the corrections and clarifications! > anyone who learned programming could see that html/xml/rxml was not a programming language but sophisticated markup. Leaving aside the "pike" tag, I guess I agree... my original statement was based on the path dependence of having written my first ever production application "in" RXML. ;)
  - BuGlessRB 4y ago
    Well, I concur; back in the days, I have created quite a few websites with business logic in RXML. I'd think that both RXML and its Javascript based successor Remixml are both Turing complete and can be used as generic programming languages (within reason). Which is not to say that creating complicated applications in those languages is a good idea.

em-bee 4y ago

I don't know that the creators understood that at that time yes, this is right, this was not well understood. part of the problem was that the concept of web development frameworks was not established yet. later it would have been easier to say that roxen competes with frameworks such as django or rails, but at the time roxen was promoted as a webserver, and so people expected a drop-in replacement for apache. in fact, roxen might have done better if it had been using apache as a http protocol frontend. in a sense roxen/pike suffers the same challenge as smalltalk and lisp do today. you can do powerful things in those languages and environments, but they don't fit into the mold of what everyone else was doing. you kind of have to give up your existing ecosystem and start from scratch learning new tools and concepts. RXML was a very high level XML-based scripting language, but you had to drop to Pike to do some things; PHP was a single language that was clunkier than Pike but didn't seem like two separate languages to learn. i wouldn't see it that way. anyone who learned programming could see that html/xml/rxml was not a programming language but sophisticated markup. for some time there were two camps, those that wanted code and markup mixed in one file, and those that wanted to keep it separate. php favored the mixed approach and python went for the latter. roxen with pike also was firmly in the latter camp. however it seems that it took a while before the latter approach became more popular and by that time multiple alternatives such as python and ruby were available. Caudium, was based on 1.x, not 2.x, even though 2.x had been out for many years. i was part of that team. the primary issue was not performance, but compatibility. roxen 2 could not handle some of the more complex rxml people had created with roxen 1. the most notable reaction i remember that per hedbor, the primary developer of roxen, was disappointed that we had forked roxen 1 and not roxen 2. he was understandably and rightfully proud of his work. but unfortunately it took some time before roxen 2 was able to achieve enough compatibility with roxen 1 to make a lot of old rxml work in roxen 2. another notable detail is that the fork was lead by his very brother david. and for the curious, the name caudium came from us looking up the word "fork" in a latin dictionary. we didn't find a nice sounding translation, but there was this reference of a roman town near a river-fork whose name we all liked, so that is what we picked.

randallsquared 4y ago
Hey, thanks for the corrections and clarifications! > anyone who learned programming could see that html/xml/rxml was not a programming language but sophisticated markup. Leaving aside the "pike" tag, I guess I agree... my original statement was based on the path dependence of having written my first ever production application "in" RXML. ;)
- BuGlessRB 4y ago
  Well, I concur; back in the days, I have created quite a few websites with business logic in RXML. I'd think that both RXML and its Javascript based successor Remixml are both Turing complete and can be used as generic programming languages (within reason). Which is not to say that creating complicated applications in those languages is a good idea.