Better place for live discussion.

[raasumy]

I think it would be nice to have a place to chat about this nice project. As far as I understood issues here is for now the only option. I would suggest joining skype chat. Zwetan will be granted master rights of course.
Here is the link: https://join.skype.com/kq91RZPV6BxF

And couple of questions as far as I'm excited a lot about all this)
Why apache, how about nginx?
Are there any plans on implementing threading by means of abc processor?
What about using databases?

[zwetan]

ok to chat about the project, not sure about Skype chat
but yeah it could be a temporary solution.

for the other questions

Why apache, how about nginx?

many reasons

• apache support CGI, not nginx (only FCGI)
• apache is more spread
• redtamarin was ready for CGI, not FCGI
• no way I'm building a website about AS3 not in AS3 ;)

Are there any plans on implementing threading by means of abc processor?

yes, on a side project spitfire
I spend quite some time working on socket server loop
it's not on the repository yet but I got one kind of threading
working with Workers

In short, you have the main worker which role is only to loop
and listen for new connections
as soon as a connection occurs it is redirected to a background worker
which then deal with a loop on his own sockets pool

  [main thread]
     |
  socket()  serverfd
     |
   bind()   0.0.0.0
     |
   listen() port=1234
     |
   select() 
     |
   selected (socket descriptor)
     |
     0. isReadable ?
        a. if selected == serverfd
           new connection
                  |
      ____________|______________
     /                           \
[background thread]         [background thread]
     |                            |
 select() loop                 select() loop
     |                            |
 selected (socket desc)      selected (socket desc)
     |                            |
     0. isReadable ?              0. isReadable ?
        a. recv( selected )          a. recv( selected )
           handle client data           handle client data
               |                            |
               do work                      do work

it's still at prototype phase but when we will have a FastCGI implementation
we will then be able to choose between different type of servers:
iterative server (single loop), concurrent server (workers), etc.

What about using databases?

redtamarin can use CouchDB now
either from CGI or command-line shell scripts etc.
simply because the implementation was HTTP-like
and it was the fastest DB I could have access to

Other databases like MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, etc.
sure, but there it is a problem of "drivers" or the protocol
to connect to the DB

some implementations can be done with AS3
some others need native support

I would say for now CouchDB is good enough

---

A bit more comments

so yeah on one side it is cool to develop server-side in AS3
but on the other side it is also a pain because a lot of basic things are missing

for ex the httplib is a nice start but does not support HTTPS (yet)
so when/if you really have to use HTTPS you either need to implement
SSL/TLS in AS3 and that can take quite some time
or you can use a shortcut and use an AS3 wrapper around cURL

and it's not only a problem of dev taking the time to write the implementations
being one of the first user of redtamarin I also noticed other problems
one being the tooling (yep kind of ironic)

when I was splitting the as3lang repo into different libs: httplib, ansilib, etc.
I did a little test building a very simple command line tool as3hash

ok trying to keep this short, main problems are

• it's hard to produce/test a redtamarin standalone executable
  main issue is the compilation and then being stuck with
  having to use "--" to pass arguments to this exe
• it's hard to install/configure/setup redtamarin itself
  the redtamarin SDK structure is just not good
  you have to grab zip right and left, assemble them by hand
  really painful

and I say that knowing the tool like the back of my hand,
so I can imagine other dev being turned off quite easily

so I worked hard the last month or so and changes are coming

• reviewed the whole production/compilation process
  hardware, setup, VM, etc.
• POSIX everywhere
• install based on .deb files
• new projector that remove the need to use "--"
  but that can also embed vmargs in their headers
• more documentation
• redtamarin should now be easy to install
  but also easy to update

so yeah it is mainly tooling, but it should ease the pain on a lot of points
and more importantly update will happen more frequently

[zwetan]

so for a better place I would advise
https://discuss.as3lang.org/