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AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server (2010)
- distantsounds 4y agoNow open source TOC/OSCAR, dammit. I want my open-source AIM clone. Please!
- toast0 4y agoThere is AIM Phoenix; it's a reimplementation though, I think the server is open source, but not sure http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php?action=main http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php?action=main
- piperswe 4y agoStrangely, there's a small amount of recent activity on the GitHub repo.
- rahimnathwani 4y agoI guess if you're starting something from scratch today you'd be better off using https://openresty.org/en/ https://openresty.org/en/ (based on nginx and Lua) than TCL on this?
- piperswe 4y agoProbably, that's what we're using at work for a lot of things.
- larrymyers 4y agoBefore a rewrite in Java around 2009, MapQuest ran on AOLserver. Tcl was a bit of a surprise to me, and struck me as a very powerful dynamic language. If AOL had open sourced it sooner it might have occupied the “A” in the LAMP stack.
- RHSeeger 4y agoTcl is pretty amazing, in my opinion. I have used it since 1995-ish and have always enjoyed it. I worked on code in AOLServer for a while, and it was a pretty powerful tool for dynamic page generation.
- talloo 4y agoIt was a bear to maintain large codebases with. AOLserver could have won had move languages been built into the server (python, perl, etc) but Tcl was so well integrated trying to bring another language to its level would have been far too much work
- folsom 4y agoBack in the 2000's Dossy Shiobara kept putting out the idea that AOL Server should have a JavaScript engine. If he had made that happen we really could be living in a different world today.
- qwertyuiop_ 4y agoZipcar ran on this until recently.
- sidewndr46 4y agoGot any sources for that? I'm curios now.
- eddieroger 4y agoI was curious, too, so I Googled it. It wasn't that hard to do. Here's one, but I encourage you to do your own searching, too, instead of just asking for others to. https://www.cio.com/article/244398/qanda-zipcar-founder-robin-chase-on-open-source-and-the-collaboration-economy.html https://www.cio.com/article/244398/qanda-zipcar-founder-robi...
- echelon 4y agoThat's not very helpful either. Sometimes folks on HN will chime in with anecdotes and other tidbits that are impossible to find on the web. That's one of the great reasons for coming here.
- talloo 4y agoAOLserver was way ahead of its time as it was a multithreaded server with native database connection to Oracle and PostgreSQL (as far back as 6.9). Its performance and ease of development was miles ahead of Apache and most other tools. Zipcar was a Boston company that was founded around the same time in the same milieu as Arsidigita and adopted AOLserver since it provided such incredible performance. I'm a bit surprised they ran it for so long but it makes sense. Many of the concepts that made it so compelling at the time remain quite relevant today though the advances in all areas of HW and SW make things like ORM less of a bear than they were those days.
- eddieroger 4y agoBut that’s not what they asked for. Anecdotes are great but sources are available outside of HN. If one is curious, why not take three seconds and search?
- exabrial 4y agoMan I miss the old internet. It was a wild adventure around every corner with a huge diversity of tech and self hosted everything.
- marban 4y agoI miss cgi-bin urls after form submission.
- freitzkriesler2 4y agoI miss it too. We've lost so much. Anytime I find a self hosted web page with very basic html, I get excited. I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design. The thinking being, if it ain't broke don't fix it. God bless Japan.
- nonethewiser 4y ago> I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design. Examples?
- selcuka 4y agoSee https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe... It is amazing that almost 10 years have passed since this article, but the example web sites are still more or less the same.
- erulabs 4y agoCan I ask why you put “self hosted” and “web 1.0 design together” so tightly? I self host a blog, and several apps, which are modern and full of JavaScript. I guess I’m not disagreeing - I also miss Web 1.0 - but combining the two seems like throwing the baby with the bath water. Can we have self hosted AND modern?
- helpfulclippy 4y ago
- gnachman 4y agoI worked on this as an intern in 1997 and led it for a while. AMA
- spokeonawheel 4y agodid you make the CD's?
- schemescape 4y agoWhat issues did you run into using Tcl? (If any)
- evilstark 4y agoHey George! We should catch up! (to readers: I was the guy who hired George as an intern and he was awesome. so AMA too!) AOLServer was so, so, so far ahead of it's time. It had a WYSIWYG HTML editor years before Dreamweaver that could post content to the server. The integrated (Illustra!) Database and TCL interpreter meant you could build basically anything with it. Props to Jimbo and Doug... We built what I think might have been the worlds first massively multi-homed, self-provisioning hosting service (called, creatively, "Navi-Service") with it. Think Linode but in 1997.
- mayoff 4y agoAOLserver was originally NaviServer, before AOL bought it. That’s why all of its API identifiers have the prefix `Ns_` (or `NS_` or `ns`, depending on the kind of identifier). Kind of like how (coincidentally) Apple’s Foundation and AppKit frameworks use the prefix `NS`, because those came from Nextstep. In 1999, I was hired by ArsDigita, a web startup that used AOLserver, mainly to provide internal development and support for AOLserver. ArsDigita used big multi-CPU Sun servers (this was long before Oracle bought Sun) and I ended up diagnosing several race conditions in AOLserver that the AOL developers had trouble reproducing because they did their dev work on single-CPU boxes. Fun fact, ArsDigita founder Philip Greenspun (of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule) knew Robert Thau from their shared alma mater MIT. Robert Thau (rst) designed and implemented Apache’s original module API. So ArsDigita hired rst to write mod_aolserver, an Apache module that provided enough of AOLserver’s API to allow running ArsDigita’s codebase (ACS) under Apache.
- silisili 4y agoInteresting. I always assumed it was Netscape, seeing as they'd purchased the company rather publicly.
- talloo 4y agoAOLserver ate the Netscape server for lunch
- duderoso 4y agoha. totally forgot about Philip Greenspun. He also started photo.net which was basically the most prolific online community for photography back in mid 90s/early 2000's. spent majority of my high school / college years browsing that site.
- davidw 4y agoI created, with some other people, what went on to become Apache Rivet: https://tcl.apache.org/rivet/ https://tcl.apache.org/rivet/ It did less than AOLserver, but was also very lightweight and easy to integrate with Apache. For a long time, https://flightaware.com/ 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.
- jake_morrison 4y agoThis was cool back in the early days of the web. It was used by Philip Greenspun, who wrote the classic "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing": https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
- atkailash 4y agoI used to think TCL was the coolest thing. Never quite got the hang of it though. Still like it, might be worth revisiting just because
- kennyloginz 4y agoAnyone remember AolTurkey?
- talloo 4y agoIt's an absolute delight to see this at the top of HN! I spent a good 8 years trying to convince people to use AOLserver over Zope as part of OpenACS (https://openacs.org https://openacs.org). AOLserver is still used in .LRN (https://dotlrn.org https://dotlrn.org) which is why the GitHub repo is still alive.
- ornornor 4y agoIt looks like .LRN didn’t get a release since 2013, is it still being developed or it reached maturity?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pushedx 4y agohttps://github.com/aolserver/aolserver https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver “AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world.” : ) That title must go to Nginx or Envoy these days.
- jabl 4y agoThe architecture of AOLserver was ahead of its time back in the day. Using threads rather than processes like Apache meant that all the threads could share a connection pool to the database. And the built-in Tcl support, while idiosyncratic (everything is a string!), was good enough for most web backend work. Phil Greenspun wrote a book about architecting web applications ("web scale" two decades before that became a meme) that was, and still is, available for free online (https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ ). Greenspun had a company, ArsDigita, that created a big framework for building web applications, ACS (ArsDigita Community System), and there was an open source version of it called OpenACS that AFAIU was basically a port from Oracle to PostgreSQL (the recently released PostgreSQL 7.0 had just acquired sufficient capabilities to be usable as an Oracle substitute for ACS) but otherwise pretty much the same. Back then when a "web framework" basically meant a hodgepodge of spaghetti PHP, this was beyond awesome. I used OpenACS to create some intranet reporting systems as a summer intern back in the day, and it was pretty good, the code was decently well structured and understandable. Though in retrospect I pity whoever had to maintain that tech stack after I left; my best guess is the system ran for a few years until they killed it off as nobody understood it since OpenACS was very much off the beaten track.
- evilotto 4y agoAOLserver was 5 years ahead of its time, then stayed put for the next 10. Back under the name NaviServer it is still being actively maintained, although new development is intermittent. Likewise, OpenACS is still a going concern, but the community is kinda small.
- jabl 4y agoIIRC Arsdigita took on VC money, forced out the original management, decided to rewrite ACS in the language du jour (Java), which as a side effect pretty much ended Arsdigita involvement in OpenACS. AOLserver and OpenACS both being stranded on their own little tech island, it's not surprising the rest of the world eventually caught up and surpassed them. My own career took a different path, so I haven't kept up with the fortunes of OpenACS. Impressive it's still being developed.
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- self_awareness 4y agoRCS: @(#) $Id: README,v 1.7 2005/08/24 14:12:45 shmooved Exp $ Nice. The codebase remembers RCS! (Of course it's not about missing times of RCS, I'm just pointing out the codebase is old)
- jabl 4y agoCVS also had the capability to automodify these RCS tags, so it might be they started with CVS.
- self_awareness 4y agoFair enough, but why put "RCS" tags into the source when starting with CVS? I think when starting with CVS, it would be enough just to put the "$Id: (...) $", without this "RCS" prefix.
- doublerabbit 4y agoIt's posts like these I wish my site wasn't half baked. Self plug: Its missing SSL. I know, but for now collects no information from the user. This is my WIP coded in PureTCL utilising NaviServer with no JavaScript or DB; everything is a button. The clock updates on the minute and you can display and soon to set the timezones. (Africa is the only region that has timezones regions configured). Getting my head around designing a timezone UI is tricky however all are powered by socket servers too. Menus, time, content et cetera. http://www.neoncrystal.com http://www.neoncrystal.com NaviServer really is a charm and while the "cloud" has its advantages you loose out on so much experience not self-hosting, coding in the language not as an app.
- jaywalk 4y agoSeems a little more like "raw dough" than "half baked"
- doublerabbit 4y agoheh, yeah, I totally agree.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jeffgus 4y agoAh, AOLServer! I remember using it when it was NaviServer. I helped to launch my employer's website (packardbell.com) on NaviServer on Solaris way back then. Some of the things I liked: * It had a decent HTML editor that our marketing people could easily use to update news items on the website. The editor talked directly to NaviServer in a WebDAV-ish way to browse and edit the files. * It was packaged with Illustra RDBMS for full-text search of the hosted website. Never heard of Illustra? Neither had I back then, but when I fired up the Illustra CLI, it looked awfully familiar! I quickly learned that Illustra was a commercialized version of Postgres. * I emailed the vendor at the time for a Linux port. The response was that Linux didn't have proper threading libraries. This is back when Linux had sub-par support for threads in the libraries. I replied with a pointer to a thread on LKML about Linux kernel-level threading (IIRC, clone()) and the response was that the functionality looked similar to Irix, and they would try a port. They released a Linux port not long after. * NaviServer didn't just serve HTML pages. It was also a basic application server due to integrated tcl. I never really mastered tcl, but I was able to build a basic repair center lookup page on the site. All this back in the mid-90's! In many ways, NaviServer was way, way, way ahead of its time.