I've been working on Perl based UNIX-y preforking high-performance web server for PSGI.
I named it Nomo after the baseball player Nomo because his favorite is "fork"ball and his nick is Tornado which reminds you of another web server. However it seems the term has some offensive/negative meanings. You could argue that Urban Dictionary can make up offensive meanings for any words but searching the term on twitter gives me a sad feeling for sure.
So i think i should rename this since it's fairly premature and hasn't released to CPAN and nobody's really using it yet. I have a few candidates in my mind. Since this software is heavily inspired by Unicorn, rack web server most of them have some inspirations from Unicorn.
- Qilin or Kirin - Chinese/Japanese myth animal like Unicorn. Also known as a Japanese beer maker. Cons: Qilin is hard to tell the spellings over speeches, Kirin is sort of taken.
- Starman - My favorite song by the Japanese rock band Unicorn. Also known as a song by David Bowie, and a character from my favorite video game Earthbound.
- Nijinsky - After T-Rex's "She was born to be my Unicorn" lyrics. Nijinsky is a dancer from Russia so it plays well with nginx as well :)
- HTTP::Server::PSGI::Net::Server::Prefork - This is the most boring but most Perl/CPAN-ish descriptive name. Hard to say on the speech and people would end up calling it HSPNSP on IRC.
"Nijinsky" is difficult to spell. Also in different countries, Russian names are spelt differently (Niżyński, Nizhinskiy etc.). I also thought of "Kirin", but there's the beer... "Haspnesp" isn't particularly good either.
According to JEDict, 一角獣 also means "unicorn" - but "ikkakujuu" isn't so memorable either. :)
Along the unicorn theme, there's the German film "The Last Unicorn", where the unicorn goes by the name of "Amalthea". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Unicorn_(film)
The German word for unicorn is "Einhorn", by the way - but a German name... Don't know.
Posted by: Marcel Grünauer | 2010.02.10 at 16:58
Yeah Ikkakuju is not that bad, but it's a bit mouthful for non-Japanese :)
Posted by: miyagawa | 2010.02.10 at 17:09
What about HTTP::Server::PSGI::YourCutesyNameHere? That way you get to have a decent namespace, and a good name.
Posted by: Bruno | 2010.02.10 at 17:15
I like Starman. I can relate with Bruno's sentiment to an extent too, but I figure you can discuss that part of it with the Plack crowd more. Also, if you named it HSP::Starman people could just call it Starman on IRC and in speech.
Posted by: fREW Schmidt | 2010.02.10 at 17:23
I picked the name Starman, and made the distribution/module name HTTP::Server::Starman so I keep being a good citizen of CPAN :)
oh yeah UD still says something ridiculous about Starman but this time i really don't care! http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=starman
Posted by: miyagawa | 2010.02.10 at 18:08
"tenedor" means fork (the utensil) in Spanish, and there's room to make it shorter and cuter (tenny, maybe?).
what about something with threads? "spindle" hasn't been used on cpan, nor has "fibrous".
Posted by: nataliepo | 2010.02.10 at 19:13
aww, you already chose. Starman was my pick out of the ones above; good choice!
Posted by: nataliepo | 2010.02.10 at 19:14
Of those... Starman. But it's Perl and PSGI and preforking, so why not try for a "P" name? And frankly, I don't need a Unicorn -- I'd be mighty happy with just a Pony.
I associate it with things that are small, but it also makes me think of cars -- as Wikipedia puts it: Pony cars were "relatively small, relatively light and often absurdly powerful." Plus, there's that running joke about web frameworks needing to come with one.
-- dagolden
Posted by: dagolden | 2010.02.10 at 20:14
starman is a good name.
But, What's the diff between starman and Plack::Server::Standalone::Prefork?
Posted by: zhang | 2010.02.10 at 20:41
Oh Pony ... it indeed is a good name.
Posted by: miyagawa | 2010.02.10 at 20:43
Plack::Server::* will be deprecated in Plack 1.0 because Plack should not implement the HTTP server part. It should be adapters/handlers/middleware to connect them.
HTTP::Server::PSGI (which was originally called Plack::Server::Standalone) has optional preforking parameters but Starman is much faster.
Posted by: miyagawa | 2010.02.10 at 20:44
Awww. I have to say I much prefer Pony over Starman for this one. (But it’s your module, so… :-) )
Posted by: Apag | 2010.02.11 at 02:27
Star Focker :)
Posted by: gigin | 2010.02.13 at 06:09
How about "foku-to-akuma" (or something similar)? "demon-with-fork" seems appropriate to me... :-)
Posted by: RolandGiersig | 2010.02.24 at 02:44
YAFWS (Yet Another ...)
There truly are some good ones available already...
Save yourself and your cute name(spaces) for truly unique programs and Google before you code.
I know, sometimes you'd rather scratch that itch yourself :)
Posted by: Joe Bloggs | 2010.02.25 at 08:15
How about "Pork"? Funny combination of Perl and fork.
Posted by: s1n | 2010.02.28 at 09:17
Sure just about every 4-letter word has a bad meaning or abbreviation for something bad :-)
However, I note that the Twitter usage is not bad---it is just an abbreviation for "no more" so please don't worry about seeing it a lot there.
Yup, I like Starman too!
Posted by: Gernot Hassenpflug | 2010.03.11 at 21:20