On Mar 22, 2010, at 7:59 AM, Sebastiaan Visser wrote:
Am I right, that it uses its own protocol, i.e. no WAI?
To answer your question: yes, Salvia uses its own protocol. Athough the term `protocol' might mean different things when looked at from different perspectives.
How do I put this delicately? I do not think WAI is the way to go. ... First of all, no one will ever agree on this type of interface. Not on the level of abstraction, not on the actual naming of the datatypes, not on the amount of documentation, not on the placement of the parenthesis.
I don't entirely agree. The python community, for example, eventually standardized on WSGI for exactly that role (standard interface between webserver and webapp or framework). The difference, of course, is that Python had a decade-long history of dozens and dozens of different web app frameworks. There were a handful of different possible targets, though: mod_python, cgi, fastcgi, scgi, bespoke stuff. If you implemented one, you'd get constant feature requests for others. Eventually WSGI happened, and it's all been a good deal calmer since. It's very much in the haskell way of thinking to try and learn from other languages' problems. WAI, though, seems to be addressing a community problem instead of a language problem. In other words, i think it's a fine idea, but it won't be widely used until the haskell community actually goes through the sort of pain and suffering that forged the resolve to use WSGI in python. We have to learn that lesson the hard way. That's my take on it, anyhow, having watched the WSGI process firsthand. -john