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Ok, some of you people really have got to get off of this Java app servers over everything else kick. Lots of clueless people seem to be implying "Well, some sites use lowly scripts to run their sites but we're special. We need JAVA for our super-duper, highly-scalable, object-oriented, five-tier, dynamic xml-parsed 'solution'." Grow up. Many of the most trafficked sites use Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and sometimes C. Is your site going to be more popular than any of these?:
www.deja.com
www.imdb.com
www.hotmail.com
www.yahoo.com
www.photo.net
www.digitalcity.com
www.villagevoice.com
www.metacrawler.com
slashdot.org

Telnet to port 80 on these sites or use Netcraft's "What's that server running?" feature to see what these guys are using if you don't believe me.

Don't believe the hype and marketing around application servers. They are for corporate IT departments who don't know better and want to appear sophisticated (and I say this because I work in said clueless environment). Don't believe your hack CS205 professor who pimps OO as the end-all be-all of programming. OO is nice but it's not a panacea for bad design. You can program just as brainlessly with Java as you can with Perl. And for those of you who bitch about Perl's syntax. What exactly is it about Perl that bug's you? Lack of typecasting? Gosh, "use strict;" is hard to type. Messy syntax? Yes, you can write ugly code with Perl but the same can be said for any language. Perl is just more lenient than most. I can't understand people who don't appreciate leniency in a language when you are trying to release a dynamic functional site in a couple of weeks. Sure, we'd all like to make pretty programs at work but sometimes we need them to get out there ASAP and with as little overhead as possible (those of you who can't appreciate this are still in school and haven't dealt with competitive deadlines or you just don't see what a competitive advantage being first and scalable on the web gives you).

Name one commercial app server that scales as well as the open-source combos. Kiva server was a complete piece of doo-doo. Oracle Application Server? Yeah, right, it was so good that Oracle stopped using it for their own site. Some will argue that app servers are necessary because they support transactions, failovers, etc. You can encapsulate most of this in the db without burdening your web developers. If you really need these features then you should consider looking at your design again and seeing if you can simplify it. In my opinion they are not necessary for 99% of the problems you'll run into.

For people who would like another opinion on why commercial app servers suck read this:
www.photo.net/wtr/application-ser vers.html

For those who'd like to read about one possible open-source solution (the same one that slashdot uses and my personal favorite):
perl.apache.org/stories/

Other good environments:
www.php.net
java.apache.org
www.aolserver.com
www.python.org

For those of you who push Java app servers over everything else: why don't you write down a list popular sites (your intranet or school projects don't count) which are using them and give examples of the hardware necessary to keep it going. I'm excited about the Apache Java project (look at above link) but everything else is just marketrdroid talk until there are results.

Try Zope.

Then try PHP.

You won't want to revert to Zope.

I work for Lucent Technologies and we've been using another crappy dynamic HTML software, Informix's Web-Blade. It basically is like PHP but has many more bugs and is a bit more cryptic to write. PHP blows anything and everything out of the water that i've tried thusfar, works perfectly, and works quickly. We're already in the process of re-doing out entire internal site using PHP3. I've written two small web applications which use it and they were developed in about half the time it would've taken in Perl or Web-Blade. I highly suggest anyone who is looking for an easy way to generate HTML (or even images or pdf files, as stated already) to jump over to their homepage and check it out!

I did unleash a little fury on IIS, didn't I. I didn't mean to turn this thread into IIS bashing. I've just had some really bad experiences with IIS. It's way too integrated into the operating system for my taste. (Anytime that you are using the operating system's user database to authentiate web users, something is just plain wrong.) And the fact that the operating system that it is integrated into is NT just makes it worse. It's just not stable, manageable, or scalable enough.

Your claim that IIS is the fastest webserver is pure flamebait. If you would like to point me to a URL, I'd be happy to look at it. But, I'll guarantee that the fastest webserver isn't any webserver running on NT. Apache, Zeus, and Netscape can all crush IIS, simply by the fact that they can run on high-end UNIX machines with a dozen or more processors.

It doesn't really matter anyway though. I doubt that anyone makes their choice of web servers based on performance tests anyway. The difference in performance is small enough that features, managability, and stability are going to be decision points.

For those of you who brought up PHP's effect on the webserver comparisons, I concede that PHP may be significant development. To be honest, I don't know enough of the details about PHP to comment on its strengths and weaknesses. I'm a servlet kind of guy myself, so I haven't checked it out. But it does seem to be a simpler solution than mod_perl. (Not that Perl isn't cool.) At first look, it just looked like another server-side scripting language to me. Which is cool in it's own right since it's open source. But people tell me that it rocks.

By the way, since I didn't explicitly say it before: my opinions are mine, not Netscape's. I don't work on the development team for Enterprise server, and am not a professional webmaster either, so my opinion probably isn't any good anyway.

That may be, but at some point the overhead of starting a new process for every request will kill you anyway. Under Apache you can use PHP or mod_perl. With these there is no need to fork or compile a complete perl program for every request.

Their stuff is at http://www.metahtml.com/. You can make an online shopping cart fairly easily, and the old version is GPL'd. Personally, though, I think the syntax of the language sucks... I wouldn't use it for any large projects.

PHP3 is a much nicer language, and is MUCH more powerful. There are a few shopping cart systems written for it you could tweak into whatever you want. Check the sample code links from http://www.php.net/

ep

See also http://www.php.net/usage.php3 for info about how PHP is doing (the graph doesn't have the January number yet, though).