This particular book was just finished two or three years ago, although it builds upon materials written in the 1990's.

It seems his attachment to AOLServer and Oracle are because they still work, and he personally has no reason to switch.

Most of what I know about web programming I learned from Philip, though I have had only brief exposure to AOLServer and Oracle. What he's teaching transcends particular technologies, and it's fairly straightforward to apply it to, say, Apache+Python and PostGreSQL.

Hey, AOLserver is open source. At the time it was the only web server with a built-in glue language (Tcl) and pooled database connections. It got me excited about web programming. Plus, the sheer amount of code already written was fantastic.

I never understood why people were put off by his favoritism to those tools. ACS was all about page flow and user experience, and in that department, got it right more often than not.

Oracle has been replaced by Postgres. AOLServer is still going strong, but I guess it's not sexy enough to compete with RoR et al.