Embedded web server?

I was reading an article(1) today where a guy mentioned he'd written his own dialect of Lisp that had an embedded web server in it.  This got me thinking.  Lisp is sort of, as some people have told me, its own command line IDE.  I know it's not the same as Visual Studios or C++Builder, but it is an integrated environment where you can develop software.

So, I'm wondering, is there (or would there be) a benefit to having a web server embedded in an IDE?  I can see how it might be beneficial to web developers, but I'm mostly thinking of desktop or client/server developers.  Would an embedded web server help with source control, bug tracking, or anything else like that?  Is this kind of thing beneficial outside of Lisp?

Andrew Burton
Monday, October 13, 2003

1. Here's the artivle:
http://alu.cliki.net/Bill%20Birch's%20Road%20to%20Lisp

Andrew Burton
Monday, October 13, 2003

It's probably good for development. There's probably few of any additional benefits worth anything to the end user/consumer. It's pretty crucial that your web server's reliability or correct operation doesn't suffer because of the instability of your IDE/vm environment. In that guy's case it's lisp. If you know what you are doing then fine, but normal admins who will adminster your software may do it all wrong if it's overly complex.

There are some software out there that operates in this mode, Mnesia database runs in the language interpreter/virtual machine that the db was written in I think, and in fact telcos hate turning off their dbs and rather upgrade code modules while the server is running--that was the right right model for a telco rdbms, other than that I am not sure why you would need it.

Li-fan Chen
Tuesday, October 14, 2003

A link:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MnesiaDatabase

Li-fan Chen
Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Thanks for that!

Andrew Burton
Tuesday, October 14, 2003

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