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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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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.
>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.
Not in a business of any size. "Slightly Cheaper" might enter into it, but actual large-scale sites that might be making these decisions will be buying support contracts and heavy-hitting hardware and cooling systems and racks and on and on. The OS cost is just gravy around the edges.
>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).
$1000 is not hefty for server software. Consider a large site with a farm of front-end servers, application servers, database servers, image servers -- a Yahoo or an eBay, say -- and start doing the math. You're likely going to pay more than that $1000 per box per month just to colocate it somewhere with adequate bandwidth.
>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.
Chili!Soft licensed the actual ASP engine from Microsoft. It's just as bona-fide.
>I mean, look what you can get for Linux instead of ASP:
All of those things are cool technologies, and some are in use at some pretty heavy-hitting sites. But ASP is also a very cool technology, and allows for VERY rapid development of dynamic content.
Also, unless you're going to be a Linux shop from end to end, most of your developers are likely to work on Windows boxes. (Not you, not me, but remember, we're talking about eBay-sized sites, here.) One benefit to using ASP is that you can have each developer working on a local instance of IIS on their Windows box, doing site development without impacting anyone else, then pushing final copies of the site, as-is, to a Chili!Soft-enabled farm of Linux or Solaris boxes to avoid uptime and stability issues.
>These don't cost a dime
Just to repeat the point I'm trying to make, Chili!Soft's target market is not www.mypersonalsite.com -- if $1000 makes you flinch, you're not playing in the league these folks are talking to.
>and give you all the functionality of ASP.
I _might_ give you PHP4 on that one. Otherwise, no. Read up on ASP -- it's very very cool.
>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?
Yes. See above scenario. MS' Dev tools are nice, nice enough to merit using them to build a site. When you're talking Internet Time, poking at CGI scripts with vi is just not going to cut it -- time-to-market is everything, and ASP allows for quick, solid development. Having it available on Unix/Linux flavors, with the actual licensed-from-MS engine, is a Very Cool Thing indeed.
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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"
This is such utter crap and I'm tired of it. If I go to a client and tell them "I can make this super-cool C++ app in ten months, or slap together this Vb in 4" what are they gonna say? Four months! Why? Because by the time I finish that C++ app, the business will have changed radically. And if I move on down the road, would the employer rather get a VB programmer (like me) at $65 an hour for 10 hours to add a feature or a C++ programmer at $85 an hour for 20 to add the same feature? Now do you wonder why VB is the most popular development environment? (BTW, it isn't even close last stats I saw).......
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
http://www.cobalt.com/about/pres s/2000/000323.html
I was an Systems Engineer for a Cobalt reseller for about a year. I no longer work for the reseller, but have still been a fan of the products. After quitting my old job, I have actively been helping people out on the Cobalt users list, and still admin some Cobalt servers. I've been one of their strongest supporters... until they started getting into this whole Chilisoft ASP business
A couple of months back they announced that they would be offering support for the Chilisoft ASP product, I got pretty upset about the whole deal. To follow the thread, click here
Basically my argument is that there is an excellent opensource project called PHP that pretty much does everything that ASP can do (and in most cases does it better, easier, etc.) that they are largely ignoring. They don't even offer a supported installation of PHP on their equipment. Its classified as 'experimental'. So rather than contribute developers to PHP and support the project, or even support it, they are going with a third party hack of a hack by Microsoft! What gives!?
I realize that Cobalt gear is targeted to companies currently deploying Microsoft technologies. But to skip over a very popular and worthy open-source solution in favor of a closed-source solution that is helping M$ 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
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