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Cobalt buys Chilli!soft
A number of folks have written to us regarding the purchase of Chilli!soft by Colbalt Networks. It seems that Cobalt is interested in Chilli's implementation of ASP for Linux for their own server appliances.
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VB's sedimentary feature accumulation has destroyed its potential for soundness and beauty; the language is a mess.
VB never had any potential for soundness or beauty. If you decide to build a motorcycle, and you start with a bathtub, no good will ever come of it. Of course, they've made it much, much worse than it ever had to be -- you've got that right! But I don't agree that it could ever, under any circumstances, been anything but a momentarily interesting toy. It ain't Delphi.
I believe that the only serious obstacle to Python becoming cross-platform-VB-done-right is its lack of a refined IDE
I agree. People should probably start emailing Borland while Kylix is still in flux. They should be going for something like pluggable any-damn-language-you-like instead of just Pascal'n'C++. That could be a very Good Thing.
The problem is that even Python with a Delphish IDE would never be that much of a selling point to the VB crowd, because they're afraid of anything but VB. They simply refuse to learn other languages. The abysmal anthropoid cretinism of their attitude is obvious to you and me, but not to them and they're the ones who are keep MS on top of the industry. You should also take a brief moment to conteplate the sheer howling horror of trying to explain Python's indenting to a VB "programmer". Half of them left-justify all their code. I don't think more than one out of ten has the intellect necessary to understand that feature of Python. In practice, they'd get bizarre and unexplained (to them, I mean) behavior from their code, and get more and more angry, and ultimately beat the computer to death with a rock. You're drastically overestimating the intelligence of VB idiots if you think they are even capable of learning a useful programming language. They're not.
A professional programmer is more likely to write code which has been planned out and written with reliability and ease of maintainance than a novice. They're also a lot more likely to understand things like testing input bounds, error handling and the like (ever break a website by entering a ' in a field?).
There's also considerable debate over just how easy ASP is. I've heard marketing types claim that but have never seen any justification for it. It's only easier if you already know VB and have Windows development experience with COM. Most of the people I know who've used both would consider ColdFusion much easier to start with, particularly if you have an HTML background. A coworker of mine mentioned that one of the web development classes he'd taken was supposed to cover both ColdFusion and ASP; by the end of the first week ASP was dropped by unanimous consent as everyone thought it was much harder and couldn't see a reason to use it. I've heard numerous similar comments about PHP vs ASP. VBscript is a mess and both JScript and VBScript are feature-poor languages. Does anyone want to spend time fighting their environment instead of building their application?
Ever try to send an email? It's one simple command in PHP or ColdFusion. It's several lines of ASP, assuming you have CDONTS or similar installed in the first place. Want to handle an uploaded file in a form? Very simple in PHP or ColdFusion, very complicated and non-intuitive in ASP. (No, I don't consider evaluating, purchasing, installing and using a 3rd-party COM object intuitive, particularly for a novice.)
Don't forget the documentation you'll need isn't in one place, either - there are separate sections for VBScript/JScript, ADO, CDONTS and everything else. A depressingly high percentage of the examples in Microsoft's documentation are just plain wrong to boot. How are newbies supposed to know where to find the documentation they need, much less judge whether it is correct? Note that neither of the common tasks I mentioned above is covered anywhere a novice ASP user would know to check, so they'll have to hope it's covered in a book or spend some time searching the web. In contrast, someone with a text editor and either www.php.net or the Cold Fusion docs would be able to develop page using only that information.
(RedHat you ask? Of course a novice would use RedHat. If you want to complain, remember that I was being nice and assuming that NT was being installed with the defaults on generic hardware with the drivers on the Windows CD and that you weren't doing *any* IIS configuration, particularly not with things like virtual servers where it's very easy to get IIS into a state where it ignores its configuration data and displays error messages that have nothing to do with the actual problem.)
Yes, ASP is infinitely extendible. So is Excel for that matter. In both cases you VBscript can call methods of COM objects that can be written in C++ and can therefore do pretty much anything you want.
It's a good scripting model, live with it. In fact, I can write a COM object in Perl and call its methods from ASP. Fun fun fun.
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Here is a page which lists the various platforms supported by Chili!Soft ASP
And this is what it does.
Sounds pretty hoopy. Let's hope Cobalt do decide to give back to the community that's put them where they are now and open-source it.
Politas
Well, as of FrontPage 2000, the protocol being used is (supposed to be) WebDAV, which is open. Also, my favourite editor, Scite (http://www.scintilla.org/) has a lot of support for ASP, in highlighting. So you could probably hack together a mixture of scite and sitecopy to clone Interdev.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Very true, although apache+php offers more or less the same solution as <insert webserver> + ASP.
At the end of the day, competing with Microsoft means providing Visual Basic, or something so much like it that the end user can't tell the difference. Productivity counts. They want to be able to knock together something professional in an afternoon without being overly technical, and ASP -- again, whether you like it or not -- lets them do that. If we can offer fully-functional ASP and IIS on Linux, we can start to clean up the last pockets of resistance.
PERL/Tk = Visual Basic
PHP = ASP
Those are my thoughts on that matter. Configuring linux boxen *is* easy. It used to be not so, but really, it's just a matter of
./configure
make
make install
nowadays. It's just not that hard anymore.
All that being said, I am in favor of ASP for linux because choice is a Good Thing.
http://gabrielcain.com/
It just means that more people will be able to move their Active Server Pages based sites off of the micros~1 platform when they next have a problem.
Slightly off topic, I suppose, but does anyone know of a good ODBC client for Linux? I visited FreshMeat a month or so ago and found OdbcSocketServer, which does work, but seems to fall apart when used with larger databases. That is, if I want to update one or two records, it works great, but if I want to suck down an entire SQL Server database, it doesn't work right.
The application, if you're curious, is to integrate a Windows-based accounting program with a mySQL-based e-commerce site.
I'd like to hear reviews before I start using a commercial product, and it looks like that's what most of the other drivers are. So does anyone have experience with ODBC clients under Linux, and which one would you recommend? Ideally, it would have a similar API to mySQL, since I'm so used to that.
Many thanks for any thoughts.
D
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If Cobalt keeps ChiliSoft's software proprietary and makes it available only with their own products, that limits the overall availability of that kind of software. It would have been better for ChiliSoft to remain a separate company and sell their product to anybody using Linux.
If Cobalt open sources or keeps selling ChiliSoft's ASP software to others, it's altogether good. That would make it easier for more people to move to Linux from Windows. If open sourced, people could also implement the ASP features that are missing from the product themselves.
I hope the latter will happen, and I think it would be in the interest of Cobalt anyway. Anybody who is going to deploy a large web site based on ASP is going to need something like Cobalt hardware. By growing the market, they can grow their own revenues.
Of course, in the big scheme of things, ASP is not all that great (neither are JSP or similar approaches to dynamic page generation). So, in the long run, I hope this sort of software will just go away completely.
I admit ASP for Linux would be cool, but only if it were FREE! I mean, that's one of the big considerations when thinking seriously about a Linux solution in a business.
I went to the Chili!Soft home page and was dismayed to find a hefty $1000 pricetag on the technology (you can get it for half off right now, for Linux -- still pricey).
Well, a license for NT Server is about that price these days, and you get IIS at no cost with that license. That includes the bona-fide ASP capabilities.
So what's so great about Chili!Soft ASP?
I mean, look what you can get for Linux instead of ASP:
PHP3
PHP4
Emb_perl
Mason (my fave!)
Not to mention good ol' CGI and some mod_perl.
These don't cost a dime and give you all the functionality of ASP.
Chili!Soft's main claim is that, with their ASP, you can use MS dev tools to develop web sites on multiple platforms. I say pbthbthbthhthbthb to that. Is that worth a grand?
Except there's a little problem with your scenario. Cobalt has a market cap of a piddly $1.36 billon, meaning Bill Gates could buy them with the spare change found in his couch. COBT owning Chili!Soft won't stop Microsoft from buying COBT itself if they want ownership of Chili!Soft's work.
The real reason behind companies like Cobalt (and especially VA Linux) buying up all these other companies, just like Microsoft has done, is not rocket science -- it's proof that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. No matter how much they'll try to sucker you into believing otherwise, and no matter how often you'll let them succeed in doing just that (see Sun Microsystems), the goal remains the same: They all want to be the next Microsoft.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I saw a bunch of people complaining that companies like redhat, cobalt and VA are using this IPO money to buy up companies left and right. Think about it like this:
1) I would rather strong standing linux fromthe start companies buy these guys up instead of some Microsoft wannabe (only in business practice and ethics).
2) They are just trying to supplement thier income and help turn a profit like any other business. The opensource software business model has NOT had a chance to prove itself. At least this way there is a guaranteed source of income for these companies in these commercial offerings.
3) It's a value added resource. Not a power pack with time restricted digital audio and a few themes).
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I have to develop sites for ASP on NT. I would love to see an InterDev-type editor -- i.e., one that does syntax highlighting for ASP and talks to the frontrage extensions for publishing -- for Linux. Any such beast? Anyone know how the FP 'protocol' works?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Speaking about the features of Chili ASP:
Based on Microsoft's Active Server Pages technology, the de facto standard for Web applications .
That's an odd statement. Isn't Perl/CGI used much more prevalently than ASP ?
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Not that anyone does, but you can build COM objects on Unix . . .look here
If not there is always asp2php http://asp2php.naken.cc/ .
you must be knew here.
remember, this is slashdot. he must be GNU here.
If we can offer fully-functional ASP and IIS on Linux, we can start to clean up the last pockets of resistance.
And while whe're at it, why stop at full functionality? Why stop at reimplementing micros~1 applications and not use their tactics? Why not embrace & extend our GPLled versions and put in some nice new features?
If the extensions are any good, micros~1 will be forced to implement them...
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
ASP (not to mention IIS) for Linux is important. It's all very well to hold the volume hosting market, but we need to get into the small companies that keep a web server in the closet and don't have a full-time sysadmin. That's where NT is holding their 24% (or whatever) of the market, and the only way we can go after them there is to provide the same features with greater reliability.
At the end of the day, competing with Microsoft means providing Visual Basic, or something so much like it that the end user can't tell the difference. Productivity counts. They want to be able to knock together something professional in an afternoon without being overly technical, and ASP -- again, whether you like it or not -- lets them do that. If we can offer fully-functional ASP and IIS on Linux, we can start to clean up the last pockets of resistance.
PHP's swell and all, but there aren't any IDEs for it, never mind slick, drag-and-drop RAD tools like Drumbeat 2000.
And PHP3 is still woefully two-tier. Where are the fully-supported APIs for talking to transaction servers or CORBA and COM objects? And why write your core logic in a language different from your outer layer, as you end up doing with PHP? At least with ASP you can leverage VB skills one a few layers.
Even JSP (which is especially nifty at the 3-tier game) has RAD tools bublling up. There's the JSP version of Drumbeat and IBM's WebSphere Studio. AFAIK, both only generate code certified for WebSphere, but that's more than there is for PHP.
Cobalt made a really smart move. Chilisoft just came out of beta with the ASP for linux days ago. I was one of the beta testers and it really is a nice product. ASP is one of the things that I have been looking for for a long time under linux because I have several web users who only know frontpage HTML (or non-HTML as the case may be) and it was really a pain for me to tell them I didn't support ASP. Now I just need to order my copy (Not a cheap product for the average user but well within reason of any company.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
http://www.cobalt.com/about/pres s/2000/000323.html
I was an Systems Engineer for a Cobalt reseller for about a year. I no longer work for the reseller, but have still been a fan of the products. After quitting my old job, I have actively been helping people out on the Cobalt users list, and still admin some Cobalt servers. I've been one of their strongest supporters... until they started getting into this whole Chilisoft ASP business
A couple of months back they announced that they would be offering support for the Chilisoft ASP product, I got pretty upset about the whole deal. To follow the thread, click here
Basically my argument is that there is an excellent opensource project called PHP that pretty much does everything that ASP can do (and in most cases does it better, easier, etc.) that they are largely ignoring. They don't even offer a supported installation of PHP on their equipment. Its classified as 'experimental'. So rather than contribute developers to PHP and support the project, or even support it, they are going with a third party hack of a hack by Microsoft! What gives!?
I realize that Cobalt gear is targeted to companies currently deploying Microsoft technologies. But to skip over a very popular and worthy open-source solution in favor of a closed-source solution that is helping M$ technology market and mind share is an insult to the community their products are based upon.
So the only way for me to continue support Cobalt's products and their users, Cobalt will have to:
- Open Source the Chilisoft ASP Package
- Offer PHP *supported* & *out of the box*
If it doesn't happen, I'm going to no longer be a Cobalt advocate. I'd rather spend my money with a company like VA Linux that is actively promoting and giving back to the Open Source community. Hell, some could argue that even Sun has contributed more back to the community.-kris
Incidently, I did an informal survey not to long ago and lost the actual results, but I figured about 25-30% of Cobalt customers are using PHP on their machines currently in its 'unsupported' state. Imagine the penetration if they offered a supported out-of-the box solution? It would be a great boost to the PHP install & user base.
I think this is an extremely smart move, especially considering the large number of current ASP users/developers. It's just not realistic to ask a small company to retrain all of its developers from VB/InterDev/ASP to PHP. The costs of doing that would far outweigh the return on investment for switching to Linux in most cases.
If I were Cobalt, I'd start bundling two more things: a high performance JSP/Servlet implementation and management interface (Resin + a web front end), and a serious database. MySQL is nice if you're writing code from the ground up that can work around its lack of SQL standards compliance and other features, but it can be difficult to port code from other DBs to it. Once InterBase 6.0 is out for real, Cobalt will have a full presentation(ASP/JSP) and backend (InterBase) solution with near-zero administration (IB was made for exactly this sort of use).
I think that sounds like a pretty damn cool solution-in-a-box, much more sophisticated and maintainable than the current server appliances.
--JRZ
Is Here