http rendering

[Lyn A Headley]

    Luc> 2) what is the interest of that approach , and drawbacks too
    Luc> ?

    Mickael> I think the advantage is that you can customized your
    Mickael> application to exactly fit your need and then, you can
    Mickael> put your apps in a single package, making your program
    Mickael> very easy to use and install.

    Mickael> The drawback is that you need to developp a program 
    Mickael> supporting at least a subset of the http protocol.

If you are talking about the "write your own webserver" approach, as
taken by the erlang crew, there are a _lot_ of wheels to reinvent.

You must not only replicate say, apache's work on the http protocol,
but any additional functionality you might need as well, such as
logging, SSL, cgi, persistent cgi-type stuff, url-rewriting,
authentication, proxying, virtual hosts, etc etc etc. not to mention
all the stuff that will come along in the future.  

I think it would be superduper cool to see somebody embed erlang in
AOLServer as an alternative to tcl, as is being done with python.  But
instead of the currently pretty weak thread communication support the
server would support full erlang message sends...

-Lyn