> On a previous project we swapped out our web server three different times
Why is this desirable?
On all my projects over the past 10 years, I’ve swapped out the web server exactly zero times because the one I have works just fine. The parent comment describes these components as “production grade”, but then if that’s the case, what could be the reason for swapping them out other than self-indulgence?
Generally, yes one would not want to swap out their web server willy-nilly...
Yet, this is one of those "YAGNI in 99% of your use cases", but when that 1% use case arises, a server swap would be far more desirable than a whole framework shift.
So while self-indulgence can certainly be a motive (and why not? as long as everyone's having a good time), may I offer a few more charitable reasons for this:
- programming API ergonomics
- performance
- application runtime model (servlets -> embedded server)
- security model
- application server features (websockets, comet?)
- binary size
- server configuration niceties
etc...
That said, a developer only has flexibility if it is built in from the get go.
A counterfactual would be to consider the set of developers who have had to put in ugly hacks because they can't just rip the web server out of the framework of choice they are locked into.
It's not. But, the fact that we could and it was straight forward still amazes me.
In our case the first time we needed to, we needed SSE and at the time there was no ring-jetty async interface (it's a long time ago so I'm forgetting the details) so we moved to aleph. Much later, we wanted to try out http-kit (self-indulgence) as we were operating behind a proxy anyway for performance reasons and it made a significant difference.
If we'd just started with http-kit that would have been fine. I guess it comes down to what features you need.
Also I 100% agree it's something ideally you would want to avoid a in the case of databases for example so much performance is left on the table because for some reason we want to be able to swap between SQLite, postgres and mySQL. Which in practice you never want to do.
As the former maintainer of Aleph, I'm very surprised you ran into a situation where http-kit was faster. Or do you mean it was just preferable to develop for?
Why is this desirable?
On all my projects over the past 10 years, I’ve swapped out the web server exactly zero times because the one I have works just fine. The parent comment describes these components as “production grade”, but then if that’s the case, what could be the reason for swapping them out other than self-indulgence?