Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
What does Vignette do? Was Re: Today's scriptingNews Outline
Author: Stephen Judd Posted: 12/13/1999; 5:17:01 PM Topic: Today's scriptingNews Outline Msg #: 13607 (In response to 13594) Prev/Next: 13606 / 13608
What does Vignette do?My bullet point list:
- Story Server can run on stonking great Solaris boxen for very high load sites
- SS provides an API for personalisation
- SS provides an API for workflow and content management, including launch, expiry, ownership and versioning
- SS processes embedded TCL a la Cold Fusion or ASP or any other server-parsed markup.
- SS has some nice builtin functions that are the equivalent to, say, the CGI.pm perl module, or the cgi Python library.
It looks to me like Story Server is fundamentally a series of hacks to build a content management system out of server side includes and server-parsed Tcl in HTML. It's what the thoughtful Unix person would have done. Working with Story Server requires careful thought, care and feeding, it's an engineer's system.
Things that really annoy me:
- it uses an older Tcl - 7.6 - instead of the latest Tcl
- Tcl is hard to grok at first for people used to C-like languages
- the coding tools suck
- the server-parsing isn't that hot, leading to performance issues and really weird name-space issues.
- the price is incredible. SS is good, but it's not THAT good. OTOH, the telco I'm contracting at at the moment simply doesn't care.
Things I like:
- a really sophisticated caching strategy. Templates can include components which can include components , and so on, and these can all have their own independant caching strategies
- different parts of a Story Server instance - the database, the Application Server, the caching manager, whatever - can all run on different boxen.
- lots of great hand-holding from the vendor.
Why are they so different to Userland in their approach and philosophy? My guess is that they see themselves in a whole different market and problem space. BIG corporates, big hardware, big licensing fees. They're after the top 5%.
There are responses to this message:
- Re: What does Vignette do? Was Re: Today's scriptingNews Outline, David Valentine, 12/13/1999; 6:10:56 PM
- You could also check out.., Michael Yacavone, 12/14/1999; 6:47:21 AM
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