xml-dev - RE: Real stuff

[Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com>]

Hi Matt,

Matt said:
However, Didier, I had breakfast with you last Sunday - how can you not
know about AxKit! Its a perfect architecture for a news type site, where
you don't actually have any dynamic content on each page - its all static
(albeit regularly updated). Actually your Ads are dynamic, but we can take
care of that with a trivial output filter. AxKit will run at about 60-80%
of the speed of a raw Apache server, so with the right setup you can serve
many millions of page views a day from it. And its not offline
transformation. Its just cached.

(sorry if this sounds a bit like a plug, but at least I'm not selling
anything, unless you want tech support or consultation)

Didier replies:
Matt, since the breakfast and your excellent presentation (at XML devcon
2000), AxKit made a blip on my radar. I went several times to your site to
learn more about AxKit. Off course, I am already counting your server as a
server able to serve XML documents. And I really appreciated your
presentation about the open source servers. It greatly helped to sort out
things. However, there is one thing I didn't understood yet: it is how AxKit
can handle dynamically created XML content. I noticed that your site
responds to an XML request like, for instance, with the following link:
http://axkit.com/news/2000/10/02/01.xml. I understand well that any static
XML document is cached (no needs to transform it every time off course) but
I could not find what the server is doing for dynamically created XML
documents. Also, when you say "regularly updated" does this means that there
is a daemon scheduled to transform the XML documents in batch (at preset
time)? Or is it that when an XML document is called and the disk version is
not newer than the cache version we get the cache, otherwise the document is
transformed, stored in the cache and then provided to the client.

PS: There is nothing wrong to sell a product. Everybody has to make a decent
living. So, no problem if AxKit is a product and no problem at all even if
it where a closed source product. What's really count is the craftsmanship
behind it and how well it help us do our job. Like an old Japanese sword
master told me "when you pay a fair price for my swords you just reward all
the love, attention, years of learning my craftsmanship and my ancestor
heritage. You do not buy a sword, you buy a piece of my life. YOu do not buy
a sword, you buy knowledge that took the shape of a sword".

cheers
Didier PH Martin