Old, ugly Fish and other Technologies
Tags: apple,
geek culture,
squid
Posted 12. June 2007.
After watching Steve Jobs’ Keynote address on WWDC 2007 it gets more evident to me to me what many people are already thinking: technologies and scientific theories are much like items of pop culture. It’s all about who wears it and it’s new shiny appearance.
I must admit, I love Rails, I own a Macbook Pro and an Ipod. I love installing hot new web servers like Mongrel and Nginx and I am proud to own a 5-digit Textmate serial number – I guess that makes me an early adopter. It’s easy to say that I love all these things because they are superior to other techs, but let’s face it: I am a nerd fashion victim.
I remember running a Squid server in my parent’s house to make web pages available offline because dial up was expensive where I lived. Now I go to university. When I have some time to kill, I like to search the web for new technologies that I can install on my virtual private server, even if I have no need for them.
In web development, everyone and his dog is concerned about performance. But I have not read a single article about Squid lately. A Technorati blog search on “squid” will leave you to choose from a list of more then 94k posts, yet most of them are from the Wildlife department. It seems that Squid is a technology that only a special kind of people would be using, in my imagination these are Unix Gurus with long beards that are engaged in the GNU Hurd project and surf the web with Javascript disabled in their browsers.
Sure, if a server technology is old, it may not be well adapted to modern client software. It may also be bloated because it has grown to many features over the years and was built on standards that are not up to date anymore. Also the support may be poor because little people are engaged in it. So what’s up with squid?
Given Squid’s caching and reverse proxy availabilities, it may be worth another look. When I have some spare time, I will find out how it compares in performance to Apache’s caching.
Maybe it’s time to rediscover some old technologies.
