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Are you using Arc for a web site?
14 points by lojic 6085 days ago | 9 comments
I realize that Arc is in a volatile state currently, and that pg has stated new releases may break existing code, etc., but I'm curious if anyone is using Arc for a web site besides hacker news and this forum.

I'm considering using Arc for a personal web site / blog that could be quite involved with respect to features, but it could also tolerate more down time than a production site, so it seems like a pretty good candidate to try my hand at Arc beyond simple experiments.

If you are using Arc for a site:

  Are you using Apache in front of mzscheme?
  Are you running a single Arc process or multiple?
  What version of mzscheme are you using?
  Any problems with uptime?
  Did you have to port from Arc1 to Arc2, and if so, how difficult was it?
  What are you using for persistence?
  Any tips / advice you'd like to share?
I'm thinking Arc3 may be showing up in the next week or so, so I'm inclined to wait a bit to save a little porting effort.


5 points by brett 6085 days ago | link

I've been running http://tracksruns.com (source http://goods.tracksruns.com/runs.arc.txt) behind apache on ubuntu with mzscheme 360. It gets virtually no traffic but has been up without problems since I started it a month or so ago. I launched it using screen so I can get back to the REPL whenever I want. The server uses some globals that are interesting to look at like optimes*.

It's still on arc0. The main gotcha is that it thinks all requests are from 127.0.0.1 because it does not pay attention to apaches's X-Forwarded-For header.

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4 points by lojic 6084 days ago | link

Thanks for the reminder about screen, that seems like a good approach.

So to be able to access the repl, did you start asv in a separate thread?

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3 points by brett 6084 days ago | link

yeah. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1272

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4 points by lojic 6084 days ago | link

Thanks - I had forgotten about the repl operator that pg mentioned in that thread. I'll have to try that out.

I love the quote from Ron Garret about the benefits of a REPL.

  "Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware
  that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a
  read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in
  finding and fixing the problem."

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4 points by sacado 6085 days ago | link

I'm using Arc at my work as a webapp. Really not a web site, just an app with a web frontend. I first used Arc0 (yep !) Switching to Arc1 was breaking a few minor things (the thread function changed). Switching to Arc2 did not cause any problem.

This is a single Arc process. As I needed it to be secured (through SSL), I use an Apache frontend. Requests on the SSL port are redirected on the 8080 port, which is Arc's port. Accessing directly this port (that is, not through SSL), is forbidden (see defsop macro).

I'ms using Ubuntu's 7.10 version of Mzscheme (360). I don't have any persistence problem (this is only a frontend to the underlying filesystem, and logins/passwords are dealt by Arc's web server). I don't have any probleme with access time, scaling and such things as I have only very few users and as it is a local application.

Adding / removing / adapting features in this app is a real pleasure. I never felt so productive in developing a webapp. Now, of course, this is a small one, I don't know how it feels to develop, say, a Hacker News forum...

I talked about it on http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2256 and an old version of the code is available at http://my-arc-stuff.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-needed-web-app-fo...

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3 points by tjr 6085 days ago | link

I'm running an instance of the news software; very few users right now. Using Apache to reroute port 80 requests; MzScheme 352.

No problems, but also only handling trivial loads.

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2 points by antiismist 6085 days ago | link

Yes, I got a site up in testing.

Using MzS 360, no problems at all with uptime. The only problem I had porting was from Arc2 to Anarki Arc2.

For persistence you can probably get a lot of mileage out of making some small changes to the news.arc model layer. I found making changes when necessary was really trivial.

As for advice, I think you should not worry about when/if Arc3 is going out, and just proceed.

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3 points by lojic 6085 days ago | link

You're probably right about not waiting. I probably won't have time until after this weekend anyway, so we'll see if we get an Arc3 gift :)

Good to hear about MzS 360, that's the package that installed on my local Ubuntu 7.10 system.

I just installed it on an older Ubuntu server that I'll be using for production and got 352, so that should be pretty safe given that's what pg is using.

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2 points by wfarr 6085 days ago | link

I've been working on my own blog based on blog.arc, but a little bit more comprehensive.

My only concern right now is deployment via Lighty.

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