F5 uses TCL as the interpreter for iRules. Many people often ask why that is.
This questions is usually followed up by an immediate, "Why not Perl?" or
"Why not Java" or "Why not ?". I
understand the question, and frankly I'm a Perl guy from way back myself, so
when I first landed at F5 and started devouring all things iRules, I was
curious about the same thing. Since then I've discussed this topic with some
of F5's best, in my opinion, and have come to understand that there are many
solid reasons for choosing the runtime that we use.
When asked "Why TCL?" my standard response centers around varying degrees of
discussing:
• Speed
• Embeddability
• Usability
These all remain true today, and I will expand on each of them in hopes of
illuminating our position with TCL and iRules, and why the Perl lover in me
was, ... (more)
The concept of a friendly URL is a pretty simple one. Basically you want to
make things in your application, on your website, etc. easier to access. This
stems from the fact that most applications these days make use of
increasingly complex paths for a multitude of reasons. Whether it’s user
specific content, auto generated pages or otherwise, typing in a URL that
looks like
“http://domain.com/a7391/users/0928179/events/live/release/20110403/regions.php?region=atl”
isn’t something that’s easy or frankly even realistic for a user. I’m
not going to remember that URL, and if I’m a... (more)
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I
ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go
looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful
iRules can be without getting in over your head.
Well we made it to 30 editions of the 20LoL. Soon we’ll break 100 iRule
examples that are under 21 lines of code each. Pretty neat stuff, if you
ask me. This week is the hoolio show, it seems. The guy is just a monster
in the forums, what can I say? I sure am glad he’s on our side. I’ve
got three example... (more)
Released into the wild, the DevCentral team is back from our week of being
sequestered in a conference room discussing the meaning of life, the universe
and everything. Well…everything as it pertains to DC, at least. We even
rolled successfully to save against being mauled by zombies or turned into
newts (hey…it's almost Halloween, gimme a break…). As such there is
plenty of content to pour through this week, including a very cool talk with
a newbie to the F5 family. As always I'll give you my picks and hope they
serve you well. Here is the Top5 for this week:
Cast Your Vote for... (more)
Time does fly when you're having fun, and trying to keep up with everything
that's been going on with DevCentral is my kind of fun. I love watching what
everyone is up to, from updates from the con to new folks blogging about
their hippy proclivities, there's never a dull day in DC land. And all of
this while we're hard at work on many things behind the scenes that aren't
readily apparent just yet. Of course, I realize I may be slightly biased and
not everyone is as apt to stay immersed as I am, hence the introduction of
this little newsletter many years ago, in which I pick the ... (more)
Coming from a *Nix Software Engineering background, Colin is no stranger to long hours of coding, testing and deployment. His personal experiences such as on-stage performance and the like have helped to foster the evangelist in him. These days he splits his time between coding, technical writing and evangalism. He can be found on the road to just about anywhere to preach the good word about ADCs, Application Aware networking, Network Side Scripting and geekery in general to anyone that will listen.
Doug Bonderud
Giles Proctor
Tom Flynn
Leonard Johnson
Patrick Pushor
Bob Evans
