jonathandlynch wrote: > Thinking about this further... > > Could we set up LiveCode to run on a VPS, so it is always live and > listening to a port. When a request comes in, it would use TSnet to > send an asynchronous request to a local database. When TSnet gets the > callback, it passes the data back to LC, which processes it and passes > the information to the user through the port. > > This would always be asynchronous and thus never get hung up waiting > for a long request. It seems like it could be quite fast. Would that > work?
I don't even think we'd need tsNet for that. Sockets should suffice for communicating between backend services, and using the "with messages" option makes them async; indeed that single-threaded message-driven approach is a big part of what makes Node.js so performant, offloading as much as practical from the process thread to the OS.
A while back Pierre Sahores posted some benchmarks here related to these sorts of explorations, generally quite flattering to LC. Of course the LC engine is made by a small team in Edinburgh while JS has millions opf $ invested from some of the largest companies in the world, so we may want to temper expectations of comparative performance accordingly. But for a wide range of workloads, LC-based daemons can work well with backend services, at least much more efficiently than relying on the CGI model.
The bigger question re. LC on the backend is perhaps why we're having this discussion at all: if performance is critical enough for us to work out LC daemons from scratch, why not just use an existing toolkit for that work and enjoy the advantages of a large ecosystem of prefab solutions?
And that's the chickens-and-eggs of this: until we have such a large community of prefabs the cost-effectiveness will continue to favor current leaders, but without someone starting such an effort we have little choice but to use current leaders and thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Software evangelism is tricky business. And when building business infrastructure, our responsibility to the company owners requires us to ask whether evangelizing a personal favorite language is a higher priority than delivering a cost-effective robust solution ASAP.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ [email protected] http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
