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The fact that you are talking about JSP shows how little most people know about Java. MVC frameworks like Struts, Spring, Webwork, etc. have been around for a long time. While PHP seems like a great tool for creating (simpler) websites, no one can deny the maturity and vast amount of libraries that Java has to offer. This is definitely apples to oranges.

Are you kidding me? This is the exact type of thing that libraries and taglibs are for. Here's the easy way to send an email:
<mt:mail server="home.net" to="foo@home.net"
from="bar@home.net" subject="mail taglib">
        <mt:message>[body of message]</mt:message>
        <mt:send/>
</mt:mail>

Now that this lame arguement is out of the way, let's talk about accessing IMAP, shall we? In Java (using JavaMail), it works out of the box. Just point to the server and you'll get a nice heirarchy of folders and messages. Try the same in PHP, and you are likely to find that:

a) You have to recompile PHP for support. (Not an easy task.)
b) You have to muddle through a number of poorly-documented functions instead of a nice OO heirarchy.
c) You'll run into weird problems like garbled email messages when you open a PostgreSQL DB connection prior to IMAP connection.

PHP is good for a lot of things. But arguing against Java's flexibility is just silly. Use the right tool for the right job and your life will be fine and dandy.

I doubt that the author of the article has much of a clue about ANYTHING he wrote about and consequently distorted things so much that it is meaningless. It's probably a waste of time to discuss something that has been so horribly mangled because people are reacting to the author's errors.

As the parent comment notes, he mis-represented what OSS was. There were plenty of other obvious errors, but I'd like to suggest that even the title and basic thesis are in error because it's not really open source software that is the key factor, but rather, low power, distributed, frequency hopping, spread spectrum, mesh networks.

Heck, the guy even thinks that Apache is a mining company, so how reliable can the article be?

That's a good MS promoter!
If it doesn't run on Windows, it's Jerry-rigged, and pushing companies to write cross-platform software would just be pushy.

Here's a little-known-fact about linux: Many major software manufacturers write software that runs on linux. The ones that don't, are doing it based on marketing strategies. If the market changed, so would their coding practices. As a business owner, I do not have the type of money to back up a Microsoft platform, and I also cannot justify using the software due to quality and corporate tie-ins. When I'm bigger, maybe I'll dig myself a hole and dive in head first (Microsoft said they already have it started for me whenever I feel like jumping).

Honestly, if Adobe made their software for Linux, then I would guess at least another 29 million people would switch over to linux. I just love how software like Blender 3d, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Zend Studio, Star Office, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, PHP, and many many others all work on Windows and Linux, and oftentimes MacOSX, but lazy companies like Adobe/Macromedia, Autodesk, and most gaming companies choose to single out one or two platforms to target simply because of marketing strategies.

Microsoft has chosen time and time again to refuse to implement global standards simply because they want to lock people into using their software. Your post proves that their marketing strategy works.

Also keep in mind that hardware working with the operating system says more about the hardware manufacturers than the operating system. Microsoft has been known to strongarm hardware manufacturers to not create linux drivers, and many hardware manufacturers are just too lazy to work with the linux community.

So while Linux, being about half the age of windows, is still lacking in a few areas, it is still more stable and provides enough features for me to use. I still keep a windows box around at work for troubleshooting other users' microsoft office problems, and for running the Adobe Creative Suite, but you can bet I'll be formating every windows box I own as soon as Adobe releases Linux binaries. (considering how closely related OSX and Linux are, I still don't understand why they don't make a linux port)

In short, if industries really did shift to linux, companies that write software wouldn't hesitate to change as well. It is our fear of something different that keeps us on Windows, and keeps software developers from writing linux code, resulting in jerry-rigged solutions like Firefox, Thunderbird, PHP, Apache, Oracle Enterprise server, and others. (note the sarcasm)

Maybe we want to know more about Geronimo before deciding to download it.

4. Use perl's regular expressions to filter out all the spam

That's what Spamassassin is for.

Cross-site scripting attacks *do not* need to be between different sites or domains. They are poorly named, as one of the original researchers, Marc Slemko points out here: http://httpd.apache.org/info/css-security/

But cross-site scripting, as generally defined, definately encompasses this kind of bug.

As I was reading the comments it seems this might be Microsoft's Microchannel moment - hopefully other States will be as forward thinking as Massachussetts.

You mean Derby right? Because in case you didn't notice, we're talking about databases here.

What's more interesting is that WebCT's Vista was out pacing Blackboard's product in terms of features (at least when I left in October 2003). Blackboard was, I believe, an ASP.NET product, WebCT's Vista is J2EE (and written in Struts and JSP, not Tapestry, alas).

My guess is that one of the two product lines will be phased out. This could become an interesting competative case for .Net and J2EE.

Sorry, JEE. Cause Sun can't stand to stick with just one name for anything.

Well, it's a good question. I don't know why they need a patent there, especially since it covers a very specific process, and not the XML Schema files themselves.

But the better question is: ok, so exactly what _can_ big bad MS prevent me from doing? Again, I'm genuinely curious. I want to know. Any lawyers in the house?

Can they prevent me from running an XML file through Xerces/libxml and Xalan/libxslt? I like to think they can't have patented that. At any rate, that would also affect anyone who's ever used XML and XSLT.

Even if they could somehow get a patent as broad as "reading XML data into a word processor" (they didn't, or not yet, but let's take the worst case scenario) can that stop me from just running the file through Xalan and getting a different file, with no word processor involved at that point?

Can they stop me from using Cocoon to automatically transform/convert the files, on demand? Because that's just the kind of thing I'd do, if the company I work for needed to access old files. Dump all those documents on a big fileserver, or into a database so I can also store metadatam including whose file is it. Then just set up a simple intranet web site, that you point at the document you want, and you get the transformed result as a download. It's not even a complicated Cocoon pipeline: a generator that just reads a document and parses it, a transformator that just applies a XSLT to it, and a serializer that just spits another XML (e.g., in DocBook or OpenDocument) or a HTML or a PDF.

Can that MS patent stop that? Because it's something so generic that it would mean forbidding Cocoon completely.

Bear in mind that at no point does it need to even access MS's XML Schemas. It just applies an XSLT to a generic XML. How's MS going to use patents against that?

Banks should require their users to have SSL Client Certificates

oops Apache License

They gave it away already. They can create a proprietary branch, but taking something out of the public domain requires large bribes to congress. It amazes me that folks still use the GPL. I attribute it to mental laziness and hokey religeons (w/ ancient weapons).

Perl's Artistic License and the Apache License are better licenses.

BTW - I am a lawyer and this is personal opinion, NOT a legal opinion.

IBM bought Gluecode Software and adopted its flagship product, the Apache Geronimo J2EE application server. Gluecode's founder went on to found Simula Labs with portfolio of 2 companies at the moment. One of them is sponsoring the ActiveMQ messaging server, a sister project of Geronimo.

What, an insect? I thought this story was announcing a cool new Google version of Ant. :(

Except the Apache HTTPD Server (I assume this is what you meant by "anyone who compiles apache") is licenced under the Apache Licence v2.0, which happens to be GPL v2 compatible. Also, although IANAL I would disagree that binarys are considered derivative works unless you modified the source of said binarys - they're the explicit intended result of making source available to download in this context, following your logic running Microsoft Windows on my desktop would create derivative works of some of the programs that make it up - I am afterall loading parts of them into memory aren't I?

As for your apocalyptic (for the Free/Open Source world) prediction, I really don't see it ever happening. As an interesting side-note though, the Linux kernel is exclusively licenced under the GPL v2, because the 'or later versions' clause was (for whatever reason) removed.

Not really. Under the old regulations, web sites could use open source software to write code that excludes open source browsers.

Granted, the new regulation doesn't really fix this (it is enough to publish source code... much of which is public anyways if it is client-side javascript), but it's a step into the right direction.

I voted last week using a piece of paper and a felt tipped pen. It worked well, I made my marks to indicate my votes, and the polling booth staff counted my votes after the poll closed. Simple, straightforward, no computers involved in the counting process to enable election fraud. Debian used to run Apache which displays the results on the WWW.

So could some kind soul please explain how and why using a complicated machine to record the voter's choice enhances democracy?

Why we use LGPL. Ironic that Microsoft supports this.

I guess it's much easier to work with an existing company than reuse code from projects such as Geronimo, Apache's J2EE server. They could embed the code into their applications under the business-friendly terms of the Apache Software Foundation license. But then, Geronimo is adopted by IBM.

Using CVS annotate (or any of the myriad tools that wrap it) is not "significant effort" for software developers. Other revision control systems have similar facilities. Here's one quick example that was easy to find via Google.

You're right. What sort of coder could possibly learn and understand complicated, unforgiving syntax? The human mind was just not meant for such things!

hey, if you are happy with make, stick with it. Use the time you have saved by migrating to write unit tests. CppUnit, for example, although you'll find that the first test that fails probably corrupts memory so badly you need to ignore the rest of the results.

In the little niche that is Java, Ant has managed to replace make. Yes, it is a little niche, but it has become so common that you assume projects have build files, people know how to write them to different levels of competence, and ides handle it. Indeed, the latest IDEs have ant debuggers. I dont know if that constitutes a success or a failure :(

The underlying problems we are trying to solve? Scale. Change. Complexity. The common ones of software engineering. In this respect, the next generation systems like Maven/maven2 may do even better, even though they are much less mainstream. Maven will happily pull down maven modules and the libraries your app needs from the big repositories out there (ibiblio.org and cvs.apache.org), so you can declare your library dependencies in a little xML file, the tools will pull them down, build your app, run your tests and then publish the built artifacts with the dependency files (.pom files). When someone else builds with your artifact, they get the things you built with too. I'm personally against such transitive logic, but it interests me.

the other interesting thing that all this stuff has enabled is apache gump: http://gump.apache.org/

it checks out and builds all the OSS java projects, in one giant dependency graph. My projects are generating failure mail today, because some other project has done a backwards incompatible change between their release and SVN head. hopefully they will fix that before they ship; the automated blame mail will help motivate them.

That kind of collaborative development is something that platform neutral languages and build tools enable. Ant works in Java land because it self contained: everyone downloading and using Java apps has the underlying software needed to do a build. If you could only build OSS Java apps on a single platform, say Linux, the number of contributors would be that much less.

if you are only targeting a single platform, specifically linux/unix, and are targeting C++, then yes, native build tools make more sense. I just wish we could move beyond make.

Triplesec

Triplesec is geared toward acting as a resource/ACL repository and can be accessed via the Guardian API (on the same site).

These are still works in progress, but I know one of the developers - a very smart guy - one of the smartest people I've ever met.

Not WebSphere itself. IBM offers Geronimo support. The Development Tools subproject is hosted on Eclipse WebTools.

Why would you?

The USR1 or graceful signal causes the parent process to advise the children to exit after their current request (or to exit immediately if they're not serving anything). The parent re-reads its configuration files and re-opens its log files. As each child dies off the parent replaces it with a child from the new generation of the configuration, which begins serving new requests immediately.

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/harmony.html

For those who does not know it is Apache incubation for creating a complete Opensources implementation of the Java Standard Edition platform.

So let's hope this will boost FSF in improving resources to GNU's Classpath as well ;-)

And maybe one day RMS will stop Java bashing ... ok, well this one I doubt :x

IIS6 already has an XML based configuration system as standard.

Apache does NOT have XML configuration files.

As far as I know Apache won't load new modules without a restart.

If you need scripts to run as different users then just use suEXEC (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/suexec.html), which is designed for that very purpose (and comes standard with Apache). One problem with this approach, however, is that you will experience a performance penalty because suEXEC only works for CGI scripts.

If you need to have the speed of a module together with the security of suEXEC then you need to install the FastCGI module too. FastCGI (http://www.fastcgi.com/ is a communication protocol that allows scripts to remain persistent and process more than one request from a single process. (And, yes, FastCGI is smart enough to only create processes when they are needed and to shut them down when they are not needed any more.) The thread-safety problem would also go away.

How about someone elses, nice and reliable scripts?

Apache needs to provide (if not a more structured file format), a set of script-callable APIs for configuring and managing the server.

I am not sure how much more structured the file format can be, but it is definitely quite scriptable. Haven't worked much with deploying large numbers of virtual servers, but seems like one could make the configuration entirely data-driven fairly easily.

Modify vhost properties at runtime without bouncing the entire server: Check.

Yeah, that would be cool. Actually, really cool, but only in a limited number of cases (outside of hosting services, that is).

Of course I tend to spend most of my time deep in the guts of only a few apache instances, so management is admittedly not something I think a lot about.

How about someone elses, nice and reliable scripts?

Apache needs to provide (if not a more structured file format), a set of script-callable APIs for configuring and managing the server.

I am not sure how much more structured the file format can be, but it is definitely quite scriptable. Haven't worked much with deploying large numbers of virtual servers, but seems like one could make the configuration entirely data-driven fairly easily.

Modify vhost properties at runtime without bouncing the entire server: Check.

Yeah, that would be cool. Actually, really cool, but only in a limited number of cases (outside of hosting services, that is).

Of course I tend to spend most of my time deep in the guts of only a few apache instances, so management is admittedly not something I think a lot about.

Don't do that unless you have to. There are better ways to get the same result.

Not that it fully answers your needs, but surely someone who manages 1000s of sites would be aware of its existence?

Apache doesn't have hot-swapable modules.

It has modules, but they are loaded when the server starts. If you want to enable or disable modules you need to restart the server.

You can restart the server in a fairly graceful way with very short downtime. But this is not the same as hot-swapable modules.

So, no, I doubt that anyone at Apache has patented hot-swappable modules.

Have a look at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/stopping.html for more details.

After reading this, I noticed it was great but the most obvious omission is a GUI test runner. Fortunately, it is possible that if you want to see a comforting green bar when your tests pass or an anxiety-inducing red bar when they fail. you'll need an IDE with integrated JUnit support such as Eclipse. Neither the Swing nor the AWT test runners will be updated or bundled with JUnit 4.

After reading this, I noticed it was great but the most obvious omission is a GUI test runner. Fortunately, it is possible that if you want to see a comforting green bar when your tests pass or an anxiety-inducing red bar when they fail. you'll need an IDE with integrated JUnit support such as Eclipse. Neither the Swing nor the AWT test runners will be updated or bundled with JUnit 4.

Someone once referred me to Cactus, which is an extension of JUnit.

It only helps you for web apps, though.

I, for one, can attest that mod-mbox generated a great deal of traffic on the httpd-mod developers list.

You're comparing a decent templating engine (Smarty) with crap Java technology (JSPs.) Most modern Java programmers disdain JSPs and use other, better templating technologies. Try using Velocity . Requires no recompiling when you make changes and is a very very easy templating language that provides an amazing amount of power (you literally can drop items into a hashtable of VelocityContexts and then access them by using "$" notation... such as "$user.name") If you want something that will really rock your world, check out JSF or Tapestry (it turns web programming into writing an event-driven application, like desktop apps.)

The problem with most PHP applications is that they don't scale. I don't mean that in a "PHP SUXORS! YOU CAN'T WRITE S$!@ IN IT"... I mean that most PHP applications aren't built with any real caching implementations (like this gallery software, or phpbb, or nuke, etc...) and the PHP frameworks that I looked at don't really provide that functionality.

The stuff availble for Java is just so much more powerful. You have the Hibernate OR mapping package that provides an amazing amount of OR work for you, including the ability to plug in multiple transactional caches, session caches, database connection pools (including the ability to have clustered caches across multiple boxes.) You have complex messaging architectures to talk to and keep multiple machines in sync. You have great web service APIs and great search engines that can be plugged in. Stuff to that degree just doesn't exist for PHP.

It often shocks me to see so many "Enterprise Level" PHP apps released with no caching implementation... you shouldn't see ANY home page hit a database on every hit. (And yes, you can easily avoid stale content by eviction, injection routines.)

So yes, you can definitely write decent stuff in PHP. But for the highly scalable enterprise environment, the libraries and packages that exist for Java and ASP just don't exist.

The other thing I hate about PHP is that there just is no IDE that is of the caliber of Eclipse for PHP (and PHPEclipse just ain't there yet.) A professional IDE allows me to introspect objects, trace stacks, change variables on the fly per hit and control each thread individually. This kind of power makes debugging and performance testing so much easier and more powerful than a PHP app. Good luck trying to seriously profile a PHP app...

So yea, PHP has it's place. It's wonderful for quick one-offs. I just wouldn't want to code a massive user load, transactional, high availability, multiple machine cluster application on it.

You're comparing a decent templating engine (Smarty) with crap Java technology (JSPs.) Most modern Java programmers disdain JSPs and use other, better templating technologies. Try using Velocity . Requires no recompiling when you make changes and is a very very easy templating language that provides an amazing amount of power (you literally can drop items into a hashtable of VelocityContexts and then access them by using "$" notation... such as "$user.name") If you want something that will really rock your world, check out JSF or Tapestry (it turns web programming into writing an event-driven application, like desktop apps.)

The problem with most PHP applications is that they don't scale. I don't mean that in a "PHP SUXORS! YOU CAN'T WRITE S$!@ IN IT"... I mean that most PHP applications aren't built with any real caching implementations (like this gallery software, or phpbb, or nuke, etc...) and the PHP frameworks that I looked at don't really provide that functionality.

The stuff availble for Java is just so much more powerful. You have the Hibernate OR mapping package that provides an amazing amount of OR work for you, including the ability to plug in multiple transactional caches, session caches, database connection pools (including the ability to have clustered caches across multiple boxes.) You have complex messaging architectures to talk to and keep multiple machines in sync. You have great web service APIs and great search engines that can be plugged in. Stuff to that degree just doesn't exist for PHP.

It often shocks me to see so many "Enterprise Level" PHP apps released with no caching implementation... you shouldn't see ANY home page hit a database on every hit. (And yes, you can easily avoid stale content by eviction, injection routines.)

So yes, you can definitely write decent stuff in PHP. But for the highly scalable enterprise environment, the libraries and packages that exist for Java and ASP just don't exist.

The other thing I hate about PHP is that there just is no IDE that is of the caliber of Eclipse for PHP (and PHPEclipse just ain't there yet.) A professional IDE allows me to introspect objects, trace stacks, change variables on the fly per hit and control each thread individually. This kind of power makes debugging and performance testing so much easier and more powerful than a PHP app. Good luck trying to seriously profile a PHP app...

So yea, PHP has it's place. It's wonderful for quick one-offs. I just wouldn't want to code a massive user load, transactional, high availability, multiple machine cluster application on it.

While I agree the title is misleading, "Apache Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools?" would be just as misleading. From the article: "D.C schools continue to experience problems with a new computer system, with some principals saying yesterday that their schools have been unable to record attendance, print student schedules or even access the Internet since Wednesday." (emphasis mine).

Not knowing anything about how their network is set up... I'd say lack of network connectivity might be a problem. This would present a problem reguardless of the software used.

Hell, given that the Apache programmers have been always made it abundantly clear that Apache does not work right on Windows, the title should really be "Idiotic choices by systems engineers frustrate D.C. schools?"

Apache does not work right on Windows? I looked up the documentation from the stable 2.0 release: Using Apache with Microsoft Windows

Operating System Requirements

The primary Windows platform for running Apache 2.0 is Windows NT. The binary installer only works with the x86 family of processors, such as Intel and AMD processors. Running Apache on Windows 9x is not thoroughly tested, and it is never recommended on production systems.

So unless they are trying to run Apache on a DEC Alpha or under Windows 95, I don't see a problem. I did hunt around their site. But all I could find concerning Windows were the standard "Make sure your system is up to date and fully patched" type of stuff.

Now as for "Idiotic choices by systems engineers frustrate D.C. schools?" I do have to wonder when you see a memo from the CTO talking about "the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination". Given that they plan on switching operating systems, maybe they are trying to run Apache on a DEC Alpha under Windows NT. If that's the case, this title certainly fits.

I can certainly see there are problems in the DC schools. It's too bad the reporter isn't more tech savvy. However, local news reporters generally are not. Schools generally can't afford a decent IT staff. One of the schools in my area recently burned to the ground because a server overheated. My 9-year-old was recently asked to install a program for her teacher because the teacher didn't know how to install software and IT doesn't maintain the student computers, just the teacher computers. Most of those systems still run Windows 95.

There is a good story here, but I don't think it has anything to do with software. It has more to do with school budgets and the inability to hire professionals.

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

Addendum: apparently PostgreSQL is also partnering with SCO so now there is added incentive to choose Firebird or something else.

PS: I found the Andreessen FOSS database, it's called Derby and it's not as impressive as I'd hoped. Still, it's an option.

It's worth pointing out that Massachusetts was one of the last states (the last?) to drop the anti-trust suit against Microsoft. There's very little love lost between Massachusetts and Microsoft at this point.

I'm sure Microsoft will try and pull something, but I'm not as sure that the state will actually fall for it. They've gone against Microsoft before, and I expect they're willing to do it again.

Besides, they've already transitioned the Massachusetts government website from IIS to Netscape Enterprise Server. Doesn't really have anything to do with this, really, but some part of the state government's done it before. (The site appears to be written using Java servlet and Java Server Page technology, which is arguably an open standard and has an open source solution available, so there's that, too.)