Re: [Chicken-users] Choosing a programming language for a web project

[F. Wittenberger]

Am Montag, den 01.10.2007, 10:45 -0400 schrieb Graham Fawcett:
> Perhaps it will be a sign of Chicken's maturity if it begins to suffer
> from the "too many Web frameworks problem" that Python encountered a
> few years ago. :-)

Once in a while I have to speak up on that topic.

All of you, who are interested in Scheme (web) application frameworks
might want to have a look at www.askemos.org

Usually I'm somewhat silent at this list, because Askemos is still tied
rscheme, not chicken (because of some FFI code, no more; otherwise it's
R5RS Scheme).  Though we have set aside some human resources to complete
the half done port to chicken in the medium future.

So, why could askemos be interesting to you?  Because it's a powerful
Scheme programming framework even novices can use.

In contrast to "normal" server side frameworks, Askemos replaces the
server side with a P2P network, replicating computation in a intrusion
resistant manner (up to a certain percentage of malicious nodes).  This
is meant to change the world - a bit: we have a german lawyers expertise
on the web on how eletronic evidence based on these "multivalent"
electronic signatures compares to traditional "monovalent" (plain old
cryptographic) signatures in german civil lawsuits.  It's changing the
value from "if one side expresses doubt about the evidence value, then
it has none since experts wittness will show how data could have been
forged" to what the lawyer calls "visible evidence" (word by word
translation of the german legal term, dunno about the correct english
one), which means "if one side want to question the evidence value,
*they* need to proof it wrong".  Quite a difference for electronic
business and I doubt any jurisdiction will be much different in that
respect.

I've been hearing doubt that this will ever work and how performance is
going to be.  Current state: each agent can do ~5 transactions per
second (over SSL/WAN).  Due to "network wether conditions" the actual
value is somewhere between 3-10 transaction per second (and just 0.5 if
no existing SSL connection can be reused).  The development/test network
is available at >94% over the past years (the figure includes a 4 week
down time due to burn out syndrome at the wrong moment).  Several
programmers are building applications as their day job.  (E.g., I've
seen a Plone clone these days making fast progress.)

Sure, you can run just a single application proxy as your whole network
(thus making it an "traditional" application *server* instead of a P2P
proxy).  You'll loose the intrusion resistance that way and gain about a
factor of 5 in speed.

To get started 3 semesters of computer since and a little Scheme
knowledge will easily get you going.