[Typo3-dev] Typo3 Application Server

[Michael Scharkow]

Kraft Bernhard wrote:

> But I want that THE APPLICATION always runs ... not the daemon by which
> the application is started again and again. ... so the application can
> read in data and output it to other sources ...

Okay, I see. You need a daemon that is constantly running, but what is 
(besides performance issues) the difference to some apache with TYPO3 
which reads and outputs data on demand (and in different formats, if you 
like).

> the dmailer script is one example for a standalone app that does a 
> sensefull
> thing. i have wrtten one myself ... a chatserver ... and i think there are
> quite some out there else there wouldn't be a special "cli" version of php
> if "cgi" could do the same ...

Okay, I don't say there's none, but there is definitely a reason why I 
don't see many servers written in PHP, or gui apps, or...

>> I'm not sure I understand: You want to chat with the application 
>> server (whatever it's implemented in) through the TYPO3 backend? 
>> XMLRPC comes to my mind, which makes the implementation of the app 
>> server transparent to the GUI (TYPO3 in this case).
>>
> 
> Well ... you could call this chatting but what I menat is that there is
> a BE module which uses IPC to communicate to the application server and
> with this channel it can load modules into the server, start/stop/restart
> them (like daemeons/services under unix) ...

Yes, that's what I meant, too. The app daemon (which may or may not sit 
on the same machine) is fed with some imput, does something, returns 
output. I guess Twisted is close to what you imagine as a framework 
(http://twistedmatrix.com/products/twisted)

> a chat is just a possible thing which you could implement with an 
> application
> server and is one of the not many things which come to my mind actually
> ,, except one things ... games ! pherhaps you know the chinese (or 
> japanese)
> game "Go" ... i wanted to implement it in typo3 .. and that required a
> "live" server and i didn't have one at that time (now i already have on 
> .. my
> chat server)
> 
> you could implement almost any live-game with an application server ...
> and games are a thing typo3 is missing ... i think !

But the point is that TYPO3 is tightly tied to the www and http which is 
stateless and very bad in realtime apps. That's why most chats are java 
applets and the like. As for live games in websites: Do you have any 
examples that work like that?

> The thing with javascript is that you have to reload a URL every,
> lets say 5 seconds if you want to simulate something almost reealtime,
> then it will surely create a very big load if there are 200+ users
> on your server ...

Yes, because the whole TYPO3 framework is called for nothing, and in 
order to have it "live" you have thousands of hits simultanously. That's 
why the WWW isn't used for that.

> i had 4% CPU load with 50 simultanous users in one chat room ...
> which is quite fine i think ...

Well, if you really implemented it as a standalone php app, the 
interpreter overhead is there, plus little optimization. I guess the big 
chat servers like IRCD should produce less load (given they run with 
some thousand users), but that's not the point.

If you need a daemon for a special app, write it in you favorite 
language and run it. I still don't see why we need TYPO3 for that, 
except as a GUI to control your daemon.

Greetings,
Michael