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Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web?
snotty writes "A well written article by Ganesh Prasad over at linuxtoday arguing that the shift towards web services has reduced the attractiveness of the current generation of Open Source web products. He talks about the market share decrease in Apache. Also mentions how .NET, Microsoft, Sun, Java, and Open Source Software fit into the picture." I think that the decrease in Apache's share is a red herring, but the bigger picture of web services is a troubling one.
The real benefits of .NET are developer productivity. IMO if you are coming from previous microsoft development background, you will pick up and understand the new development platform (.NET) very quickly. As a matter of fact, it took merely days for me to grasp the new features of .NET coming from a ASP/VC++/VB/etc background. Lets face it. Microsoft has always been about numbers. Forget the quality of developers attracted to microsoft platforms, there are simply millions and millions of them, and microsoft knows how to attract more and more of them. This has always been a strong point for microsoft, and this is (IMO) the driving force behind .NET. Make it easy for the developers, make them feel comfortable, impress them with bells and whistles and lock them into the platforms.
When such a huge amount of developers (some good, many bad) are using the platform, so must all the USERS who use those developers products.
It worked on me.
If a penguin dies in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, what sound does it make?
ASP is a language? Thanks for letting us all know upfront that you have no idea what you're talking about. Hint: You can use Perl, Python, VBScript, or Javascript, among others, in making ASP pages.
Why would people turn away from a Unix solution and turn to an MS one? Sure Microsoft products are buggy and full of holes that 6 year old kids can take advantage of, but I'm sure that *nix products have their flaws as well, but their not as easy to exploit if they exist. In the past decade, which type of OS has had more hits from a virus or some other damaging piece of softare? Need I answer? Which one has a new security patch put out daily or weekly? Now if I were the White House (or some other big place) webmaster/admin I wouldn't use IIS for the sole purpose that all of the smart, talented geeks out there hate Microsoft, and they will attack it at will.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Second, and more importantly, since when has feeding the fires of corporate IS departments been the prime motivator of free software development? It's a pity so many otherwise intelligent people have swallowed this poison pill of believing that profits are the sole metric of human accomplishment. What is important is this: How many people have a choice that they would not otherwise have, at work or, better still, in their private lives? How many people have we helped ?
That's all that matters in the Big Picture. Everything else is just ego games with twisted little men in suits who fancy themselves alpha males because they have a bigger number in the bank database than you do.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I agree that Tomcat is much more relevant than Apache here. But Tomcat's leadership is tenuous.
.NET becomes available, it will come with documentation that will take you step by step through the a very easy process of deploying a simply amazing application running on it. Getting your amazing application developed and deployed may be a totally different proposition, but how are you supposed to know that?
Open Source advocates scoff at Microsoft's claims to lower TCO. It flies in the face of our experience that Microsoft products are a bitch to keep running and Open Source products just hum along with very little support effort.
But let's face it -- most of us didn't initially choose Open Source software because of TCO. We chose it because we had a need and the open source alternative allowed us to address it without the bother of getting permission to buy the commercial products. Low TCO was a pleasant surprise. This leads us to understand the other benefits of Open Source and perhaps eventally Free Software.
People who do have the power to buy things don't follow this adoption path. They do worry about TCO but not having a crystal ball the have to guesstimate TCO by some substitute metric.
The most obvious way of doing this for yourself, if you are not a profound technical thinker, is to estimate TCO by TCGFW: the Total Cost of Getting your Feet Wet. If there's one area that Microsoft has a tremendous lead over Open Source it is in this area.
Having installed Tomcat myself in order to evaluate a servlet based product, I don't think it is that hard to get working. But you do run into pitfalls with mysterious configuration files. A few hours of noodling over documentation and fooling around with settings and everything was running. In a production environment this kind of initial difficulty matters not at all -- it will all become as natural as breating I suppose. But in an evaluation environment it can make all the difference.
You can bet that when
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No -- what you speak of will make a more 'user-friendly OS'. User friendly = loss of power. I don't care to field off any theoretial arguments on that (yet). It's interesting how everyone was happy on the 'net before big-business moved in. Linux/Open Source/whatever doesn't 'have' to compete with Corporate America.
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People always says that open source problem lies in that there are too many options, that too many GUIs confuse users and multiplicate the work. But having many options is the heart of the movement. What i hate most about microsoft products is that they turn a personal computer into an electrodomestic, theres only one way to do things, and that makes ms community (if theres such a thing) to be much more static and subjugated to ms decisions of "innovation".
I admit its hard to track of all the new versions of open source projects, keep updating the tools, but i think that is that constant evolution, branching, and merging of projects what its most promising of the open source model of development, because it makes me believe that progress is always on the way, and that is a question of time for a new revolutionary way to do things to appear.
And about the marketing things, well, i dont believe that the objective of open source its to get to the mainstream. Its objective is develop better and independent software, getting to the mainstream might help to do it, but its a medium, not the goal. If the mainstream decides not to use the awesome pieces of software produced by open source, its a problem of the mainstream, im not going to feel bad because people are stupid.
While we have the resources to keep evolving software for free, the open source movement is safe. If people believe more in marketing than in results, its their choice.
Santiago
windows 2000 for 4 years now Wow. you are a Leet g0d!
so when did you haxor Msft to get the sourcecode and get it in 1997?
This is where MS rules the roost. Developer mindshare and tools. Producing applications 'easily', an integrated 'one stop' solution. So yes, open source can do all this, and more, but you can be sure that MS will be focused, as always , on making development a more egalitarian occupation. Businesses, and managers, appreciate this and MS finds itself inside a wonderful virtuous cycle of revenue generation.
And before you accuse me of being 'infected' - I hate 'marketing machines' as much as you. I haven't given up yet though.
--
Alastair
Originally, I was going to say "screw .Net" and figure J2EE was the best way to go. Disclaimer - I am predominantly a VB programmer (yeah, I know: Boooo, sign of the cross, "get back spawn of satan," derisive laughter etc... moving on), so I should be inclined toward .Net, but I don't like the totally avaricious nature of it. And besides, VB.Net looks like an almost completely different language, so I figure if I have to learn a new language (one that I can decently expect to get a job with), Java is the way to go.
.Net release and licensing issues. Remember OS/2 Warp (a better Windows than Windows - so long as you only wanted Win 3.1). An MS is going to play coy with the whole licensing thing until there are enough open source programmers on board, then pull some standard-issue nonsense and either trap them into a platform for development or leave them high/dry.
All that said, I now wonder if this guy doesn't have a point. Open source should be big enough to do both, shouldn't it? Different strokes and all that. Only two things bother me with the whole Mono project (and the other one whose name escapes me): being constantly behind the
Just a thought.
Just finished a book on J2EE.....
- Weblogic 6 and Persistence PowerTier can cluster stateful session beans (though not transactionally).
- Entity beans with CMP don't need to be slow (see TopLink or Borland App Server).
- Message driven beans in WL 6.0 are excellent ways of listening to bus-based applications (price feeds, etc.)
- Container managed transactions make it easy to redesign your commit points if you're going to reuse a component. it doesn't necessarily make the "first try" design any easier.
- Location transparency was thrown out with RMI.. since every RMI interface extends Remote, it was Jim Waldo's intent to FORCE you to catch RemoteException to handle remote errors. So the point is to keep it easy, but recognize it's not transparent
- most servers handle the working set of stateful session beans quite well, thus creating an excellent way to handle large amounts of conversational state (beyond HttpSession which is web-only...)
EJB isn't perfect, there ARE stupidisms, but it's pretty good.
-Stu
Search for IIS: over a thousand jobs. Search for Apache: 130 jobs.
130 jobs at the biggest job website on the web.
I give up.
Yes...
I'm really perplexed as to what the great benefit of those is supposed to be? Isn't all that web services crap just a hyped up way of designing a typical dotcom shopping cart?
No. You obviously don't write serious business software all day every day, and been doing it for years. Sun's API standards are nothing short of a godsend. It's not about building a fscking shopping cart, you can do that in PHP. As the author said (and im paraphrasing), Web Servers have been commoditized, what matters now is Web Services.. or better yet, e-business platforms. That means alot more than shopping carts. That means robust infrastructures for moving your entire business online, moving everything (including your partners). There is immense complexity in taking all of your in-house (in-enterprise) business systems and moving them to a web or internet (think Workflow-enabled and P2P) model. I'm sorry but you can't do that in PHP on Apache. Well, in truth, if you had a good platform Apache and PHP could factor into that but only as a small component of a much bigger picture. In-house business software is moving away from what it was in '98 -'00 and back to what it's always been: integration, integration, integration. The problems facing businesses today however are much more complex because you don't only have to integrate your "shopping-cart" with your ERP, you have to integrate it with your suppliers' MRP/ERP systems, your customers' purchase systems, and your partners' services. That's hard to do in any simple language/platform alone.
Microsoft has enough high paid strategist to know that much of server software is being commoditized, what they are trying to do is sell web services built on an infrastructure that you'll use,... their infrastructure. J2EE ,on the other hand, is less the Java language and more the API's for an e-business infrastructure. With that in mind, what the author says makes a whole lot more sense. To the most principled (or bigoted) of us, the situation looks like a choice between two evils. So be it, just make sure you choose the right one. IBM has certainly chosen J2EE and they seem to be good at choosing bedfellows lately (i.e. Linux).
Admittedly, the documentation has gotten far better since I used it -- it was simply disgraceful when I was using it (an undocumented framework is not very useful). But I seriously doubt that the concepts have become any easier since then.
Honestly, I think it has a lot of the problems that MS products have -- at a certain level, it's dead easy. But as soon as you try to understand what you are doing, you realize the underlying logic is spotty, the metaphors not really complete, and the whole thing doesn't feel deterministic.
I was seduced by the promise of Zope, mostly I think by other people who thought Zope would be really cool as soon as they really learned it. So with this I caution others.
Don't put off learning Zope any longer folks. This is the real deal.
J2EE? ColdFusion? .Net? PHP?! If the thought of using and of those makes you gag, ZOPE IS PERFECT FOR YOU.
I heard about it for years until I sat down and actually looked at it. There's a book from the New Riders out right now ("The Zope Book") that explains it all. Ask management to buy it. Now.
The book isn't necessary. Zope is incredibly simple to use. But I found that the book held my hand just to the point where it got me excited about all of the things it could do, whereas I'd normally lose interest.
The learning curve is incredibly small if you're a web developer with some Python experience. This is no major feat. Learning Python is extremely easy.
Zope has a real open source community, a beautiful design, and is extremely fast to develop. We are definitely doing all of our new sites in Zope. You should consider it. Check it out.
Did you even bother to check with Netcraft as to what the actual cause of Apache's drop was? Are you there? Wakey, wakey?
Since you can't be bothered to follow the link, here's the quote:
What will happen next month? Apache won't be losing ground, unless Namezero had a couple of thousand domains lying around somewhere on Apache and decide to change them to IIS as well.
Namezero have thousands of domains. As for physical servers, no, they don't have many. The drop in numbers is due to a couple of free web sites that Namezero hosted being shifted.
I don't think it bodes badly for Apache. The author of the article linked was a troll, and comes from an disreputable trollish bundle of bollocks organisation. Do you think I believe their trash? As much as I eat my faeces.
I would tell Mom and Pop that Mac OS X server with a FileMakerPro database and Apache would get the same work done, but far more securely. OS X Server has Apache built in, and some known & stable firewalling built in (it's either ipf of ipfw, I forget). FMP has a nifty web plugin that gives it a web front end (disabled out of the box, but there) for the dynamic stuff, and then use Apache for the static stuff. Sure, the performance would be just as bad as NT/IIS, but it would be safer and just as manageable by Mom and Pop. Even better, I would tell Mom and Pop to arrange their web presence through a colo/hosting company with a skilled tech staff.
itachi
Linux should make use of .NET if it shapes up to be a standard communication technology. Why not?? M$ is a business venture to enhance communication, Linux IS communication, down to the finest level of granularity. Linux is by default the larger entity of the two. Monkeys using tools...
Repeat after me, all you need to do web services is a web server and a programming language with a socket library and strings support (i.e. almost all of them). Everything else is syntactic sugar and icing on the cake to maximize developer productivity the same way VB and ASP are supposed to versus C++ and Perl CGI.
What?! J2EE has very little to do with web services. J2EE is middleware. Web services can be implemented with anything, that's true, but the point was that battle is going to be on the middletier architechtures, not Apache vs. IIS. And the battle is going on allready.
It's not about programming languages either. It's about component architechtures. Currently Java is strong and is going to be. And I'm happy with that. Personally I'd say it would be nuts to begin desigining and implementing OWN component architechture from scratch just because {insert-your-favourite-language-here} is THE best.
I'm doing J2EE development and I use much open source software. In open source java world there's quite much GOOD projects going on, projects that are innovative and deliver good software. Of course slashdot won't know this, since here java=applet or java=javascript.
JBoss might be the best example. Truly innovative and good piece of software! But it's not written in C or Perl so it's propably news to avg. slashdot reader.
Ironic that 99% of linux is GNU software. Software that has never been interested in surveys or graphs or marketshare or domination, but merely to give some freedom back to the users that the corporations took away.
then why care when microsoft is on 99% of the worlds computers? YOUR freedom isn't taken away. You can still use linux all that you want.
Microserf: "We'll turn the Personal Computer into a Network Computer. FINALLY, we can conq..."
Open Source Zealot (covering his ears): "LALALALALALALALALALALALA!"
Frankly, people should quit complaining and start coding.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
What is so important about market share anyway? If product X does what I want to do, does it well and in a way that I like, why should I care whether product X or product Y has a greater market share?
I don't mean to pick on details or anything, but the guy basically listed "consistency of user interface" as three of his points. Why, exactly, is it +5 insightful?
Your post blames Microsoft for things that are really your companys fault. SQL Server doesn't "shut itself down automatically" unless there is something wrong with the machine or its setup.
Agreed. At the same time, more so than the actual choice, I would blame the consultant who installed a database for which we don't have a real DBA (in house). We have had a number of 'experts' look at it, but to no avail. There's probably nothing wrong with the server hardware itself, from what we could tell.
Sounds like you got to clean up a mess left by someone else and you persuaded your company to use the tools you are most comfortable using. I just don't think its fair in this case to blame MS for things that are the fault of the company and the consultant that it hired.
Actually, during the course of my employment I was QUITE comfortable using the MS stuff. I was finding Java scary, mostly because of the scope of how much rewriting had to be done. I chose the platform best-suited. While researching, I did actually consider sticking with ASP/COM, and just doing a rewrite with that. My research (which I won't go into), just showed that Java was going to give me a lot more for the effort.
You will need to get on the Apache mailing list and regularly apply patches to keep your application secure. Thats not something unique to IIS.
I will never argue that. I will argue, however, that the 'reboot and pray' method of upgrading isn't acceptable. I can upgrade an Apache installation without bringing the box down, and have done so before, and worrying that it might not come back up.
And what do you plan on replacing SQL Server with, Postgres? Plan on rolling your own full text indexing, replication, and transactions, features I'm sure you already use being an eBusiness company and all.
You sound skeptical. Ok - we are not an eBusiness company. I work in the eBusiness department of a company which has been in existence for 20 years. Mind you, I never mentioned that the database is necessarily going to reside on Linux (though the front-end might). We have a lot of Informix expertise on our end, and are reviewing what needs to be done to move to Informix (possibly/probably on SCO), which will have the added benefit of having to only administer a single db platform. And of course there's the access to the legacy data and apps which is a nice bonus.
So in fairness, the technology that is "well-suited for the job" is the one you are most skilled at, and doesn't really have to do with the relative strengths and/or weaknesses of either Apache or IIS. Right?
Probably not. I have less experience with Apache than I do with IIS, and before we started with Java, my VB/COM experience was more developed. We did have unique requirements, however. I cannot really go into them (usual NDA-type stuff), but let's just say that we have *so* much customization with our tools that it would have been impossible to keep sorted out using VB and COM. Again, there were other tools that we considered, but when reviewing our requirements Java came out on top for everything.
Although I'm glad you got your company to switch. I'm thinking of doing the same thing, but its primarily due to licensing and $$$.
Licensing is a bitch, but we're not getting away from that with our choices anyway. Our database will be Informix, and we will definitely be maintaining support contracts for the OS platform we decide on. The money is there. We had people willing to deal with whatever platform was decided as the best one, per our requirements. Our choice has been made for Java, and we're pretty much decided on the database. The OS for the front-end servers is still to be tested.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
You mention developing web applications that are just like normal applications but with a web interface...how exactly does this differ at all from Apache + mod_CGI? I mean if you're using the web you're sort of stuck with using HTTP which has specific interface routes. How does writing an app in C# become easier than writing it in C/C++? A problem with C# like Java is that your code is only going to be as fast as the sandbox it is running in. I'm just curious, using NT is fine and dandy since you're a small business and don't need or want to fuddle with Unix systems all day. I'm just wondering how you came about your choice in language and whatnot.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Enterprise-class solutions usually consist of:
-Scalability. Replicate tiers from the solution to provide solutions that scale beyond a single computer.
-Transactional support.
-Built-in declaritive security. Leave the role of security to the deployers where it belongs, not with developers.
-A rich API that has built-in connectors to legacy systems, such as CICS.
In short, you need an application server.
Hmmm....CGI+Perl doesn't offer any of this. Gee, J2EE does. So does Site Server (many people forget that MS invented the market we now call "application servers").
You know, I've heard that, during wartime situations, pilots often resort to things like duct tape to repair their aircrafts. Does that make duct tape suitable for commercial airlines? No. Just because one person uses it, successfully, for certain tasks does not mean that it is the appropriate tool for those tasks.
--Be human.
WTF is this!?!!?
http://www.slashdot.org/java.sun.com
>> The 'website' is one end of a big beast, the pretty end. Web services are the rest of it. And Apache doesn't touch any of it. <<
Table-ized A.I.
I think I agree with almost all you say but it's very easy to get depressed with it all. I deliberately held off replying to the original article because I did not want to exhibit any knee-jerk reaction - but the points made are valid. There's both a depressing and exciting aspect to it all though; depressing because no 'open' development process can ever match a single, rich and driven entity when it comes to market competition. The 'market' is often naive or easily herded after all. Exciting because the future can still be in our hands - we have the code after all, and ideas. And this can't be locked up.
--
Alastair
Let everybody argue about what's the best architechture, I'll just get on with it & adapt later.
OK, more than one word - so sue me!
Coming from experience, i suggest you stick with windows if you're using java as your backend. The java offerings for linux are buggy, slower and in some cases, just plain broken.
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Yeah, that is the difference. .NET, an experiment with theoretical support for multiple languages. JVM, a working environment designed for use with Java that theoretically supports other languages.
These exist already. Webmin.com has a web based one, Linuxconf provides the same and a text / gui variant.
Unfortunately, I supsect that if they counted these servers it would make IIS even more dominant. Most companies that I work with (Fortune 1000 and some small/midsize companies) have tons of NT file/print servers around and it's really easy to set up an intranet site for the department on a file server you already have. Most companies use NT for file and print, not linux/samba (sigh)
Sounds like you got to clean up a mess left by someone else and you persuaded your company to use the tools you are most comfortable using. I just don't think its fair in this case to blame MS for things that are the fault of the company and the consultant that it hired.
You will need to get on the Apache mailing list and regularly apply patches to keep your application secure. Thats not something unique to IIS. And what do you plan on replacing SQL Server with, Postgres? Plan on rolling your own full text indexing, replication, and transactions, features I'm sure you already use being an eBusiness company and all.
So in fairness, the technology that is "well-suited for the job" is the one you are most skilled at, and doesn't really have to do with the relative strengths and/or weaknesses of either Apache or IIS. Right?
Although I'm glad you got your company to switch. I'm thinking of doing the same thing, but its primarily due to licensing and $$$.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Don't take my word about hazardous hotfixes. Do your own google search on "hotfix causes problems" and see for yourself. I imagine server admins who got burned by a recent broken hotfix, or at least read the June 8 CNET article about it, didn't want to be guinea pigs for MSFT's newest fixes.
It's splitting hairs to point out that this is an Index Server hole, not an IIS hole. Sure, and there was a mid-1990s hole that wasn't an Apache hole. It was a hole in a CGI script that happened to be part of the default Apache distribution. But let's not split hairs: it was effectively an Apache hole. This is effectively an IIS hole.
The difference is that the CGI script was just for debugging, whereas Index Server performs a very important web-site function that would be missed if turned off.
If you feel this is still an unfair comparison because Apache doesn't ship with a search engine, feel free to point out any remote exploits in SWISH or other popular free-software search engines. If you find any, be sure to say when they occurred. Good luck!
IDC Survey Shows Linux Share of IT Budget Will Grow To 9 Percent In 2002
Well, geneally you need something like COM+'s transaction implementation to handle important database work. You generally need something that allows for modular, encapsulateable, reuseable code that is resused across many places in the enterprise (again, COM+ does that). And you often need something more powerful than a scripting language to build real components (Java, C++, even VB). These are a couple of important things that flat files and scripts just can't do properly. It's not to say that you CAN'T do it with CGI+Perl, but quite honestly, more often than not, it's going to end up a messy patchwork that isn't suitable for large enterprises.
You did a pretty good job of perpetrating the myth of microsoft invincibility. Contrary to your claim, they do not always succeed. For example, despite repeated efforts they were never able to budge Quicken from its complete dominance. They bought FrontPage after internal efforts to develop web authoring tools came up short. They have paid an arm and a leg for speech recognition technology (hired top CMU researchers, invested heavily in L&H, and outright bought Entropics) but nothing ever came of that, their speech recognition technology still sucks rocks.
Just because one person uses it, successfully, for certain tasks does not mean that it is the appropriate tool for those tasks.
Out of curiosity: at which point does it become appropriate? When a hundred people use it for such (which example I can submit just from my last company). A thousand? A million?
All the things you list CGI/Perl as lacking, I've seen deployed under CGI/Perl. I've also seen them not deployed under J2EE when they could have been. I think you need to come up with better criteria.
Yeah, I browsed too and liked it. It is not clear what the problem is but for me it is clear that JBEE or watherver is not the solution.
and apache is installed, BY DEFAULT, in many *nix installs.
I love how it is NEVER EVER NOT EVER REMOTELY POSSIBLY a problem with the M$ software. It must be 1) the hardware, 2) the setup (which M$ makes sooooo easy that you have to be a moron to get wrong), or 3) you're a moron and if you just took enough M$ certification classes you would eventually stop being a moron.
Yes it is M$'s fault, everything on that box was from M$ and it couldn't work together.
I would have thought that someone who works in a M$ shop would be more familiar with M$ stuff and not tomcat stuff. Maybe the person just started, but why would a M$ shop hire a java/non-M$ person?
Maybe it turns out that tomcat/java was the best solution and that M$ just didn't handle it.
The problem that apache and similar open source products have here is that for once microsoft have done something good. .NET actually does offer a lot to people that just is not available with open source software? How many people here have actually got hold of the software and tried it out for a few weeks? Not many I would guess.
I'm all in favour of open source software, but it used to beat microsoft both on freedom, quality, and inovation. I'm not sure the last two are true any more.
Sig is taking a break!
What are the chances an even newer version will work reliably?? (rhetorical question)
Not likely. We ran some tests with 2000 and not only did it run slower, but it was even less reliable under load for us (for our particular needs). Actually, the higher-ups WERE pressuring us for a time to upgrade to Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000, since the rest of the company was getting W2K on their desktops. I refused until we could prove whether or not we'd gain anything from the move, which I'm glad I did.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I find it surprising that anyone has even an inkling of hope that dotNet will succeed. "Web services" is a buzzphrase with no substance, a remaining piece of fallout from the silly dotBomb era. The only reason it is getting press is that the marketing types are at a loss for hype with a stagnant tech industry. In a sense, they are trying to create a market that doesn't exist and doesn't want to exist. Web services are a "tried that, didn't work" affair. They embody the idealistic dream of a business that has no physical presence, no physical product or service, low overhead, and yet makes lots of money because what they have to offer online is so original and desireable. The closest example I can think of of this model working is EBay. But even then, the end product has close ties with the physical world. (..that is unless you're auctioning off your karma-whored Slashdot accounts. :-)
M$ is trying to provide a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The fact is, Apache, Perl, PHP, and other related toys are all anyone will ever need for web design, "web services," intranet thin-client goodness, kiosks, B2B integration foo, etc. If M$ tries to mandate anything proprietary to the simple task of serving public web pages, it won't fly because anyone not using XP will be instantly alienated. And if M$ does not add anything proprietary, they will have nothing valid to differentiate dotNet from existing Apache/IIS solutions. It's lose-lose for them either way.
Articles like this are nothing but FUD from pundits who are still in disbelief that Open Source actually worked as promised. No, the battle is not over, but Open Source is by no means on the losing end.
How 'bout Oracle? It's industrial strength, and unlike MS it's multi-platform.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
imho, it may easier to create a m$ web services solution, but i don't think you'll have the same flexibility and performance
Allow me to humbly disagree. There are things that certain technologies can do and certain things they cannot. In this world, no one technology is ever 'best' or 'worst', they are either well-suited for the job or they are not.
In my example, I work for a company which was always a Microsoft shop (Microsoft partner, and sells tons of MS stuff). Guess what - our particular eBusiness solution, which was developed using the latest/greatest MS solution wasn't up to snuff. We couldn't get the flexibility out of the application we needed (even a redesign wouldn't work - VB had too many limitations), IIS either crashes on a regular basis or needs constant hotfixes to keep it secure, and SQL Server shuts itself off whenever it feels like it. And we can blame the 'expert' consultant who set the thing up initially, took off, and left me to try to support the damned mess that was left.
Enter Java. Using Tomcat as the Servlet engine, and the Velocity template engine, we have nearly completed rewriting our entire eBusiness web application, and this new model demonstrates the ability to customize both the look and feel (a custom framework using Velocity which can load customized templates per customer), and a Servlet framework which can automagically load custom code on a per-customer basis. This code is simply written to extend previous code. Both are loaded on the fly (not necessarily compiled into the main application). Speed/ease of development? We are adding new customizations and features in a day or two when they used to take a week or two to complete when using VB/ASP and COM. In other words, by doing the complete rewrite we have already saved significant amount of developer time, after that initial investment.
We are using this new app in production now, and there have been no problems, other than SQL Server still shutting itself down. This will change within the next two months, as we are moving our database to something more robust which we already use for our backend.
Still being a MS-shop, I was shocked to find out that the president of our company decided to let me go ahead and use what I want on our servers. He was getting tired of the constant security worries and instability of the thing. And yes, we are going to switch to Linux/Apache as soon as we eliminate our final few dependencies on MS-specific code.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I'm pretty sure (IANA Java Expert) EJB's have access to the session object (at least under Allaire's JRUN server). JRUN can store session in a JDBC datastore, giving access to any Bean on your network.
.NET takes the lead. There are multiple ways that .NET maintains state. .NET comes with a "session service", that allows a cluster of machines to act as session servers. It also allows OLEDB or ODBC compliant datastores to host sessions as well. It can also (with a performance hit if your page is large) maintain state between pages via ungodly URL's or hidden form variables - all behind the scenes of a developer.
This is where
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Admintool. All it does is make the server a print server. If I have a user in building X and another in building Y it does not help them out beyond providing a list of possible printers to use. Which does not help if the application does not provide a list to choose from. Windows has a stadard architecture for selecting which printer to use. UNIX does not. Where was Microsoft when few years ago we were trying to integerate Windows machines into a SUN network. They did not support NIS, NIS+ or NFS. AFAIK they still don't.
SUN has had PC-NFS for some time and WIndows has shipped with a driver since I think the Win95 days (but I tihnk you still needed the full blown package from SUN but I am not sure). Microsoft has had a product out known as Services for UNIX (a.k.a. UNIX Services for Windows). I think version 1 came out a couple years ago. Version 2 has been out at least a year going by memory. Not sure if SFU1 has NIS in it, but SFU2 has NIS or NIS+ (not sure if it does both or not). I think both has NFS -- I know SFU2 does.
Sun Tzu wrote that to win a war you had to know yourself and know your enemy. Looks like you need to work on that know your enemy part (Microsoft).
-- Argel
Should it?
Hell no! I've administered to IIS and Apache servers for years, and all that IIS's GUI ever does is get in the way. Let's imagine for a moment that you have an IIS server hosting multiple sites, and that one of those sites is working properly while the other doesn't work at all. Now tell me how you'd go about comparing the settings on the two to see what's different? It's a god damn pain in the ass. You can't compare the two side by side, and there's a handful of entirely separate panels to check for differences, each with sub-panels.
Now, with apache, I can open two terminals/editors and compare the comparisons side-by-side in just a moment.
With text configs, I can also compose a template for new sites and set them up with a quick cut and paste operation. Much less work than creating a new site in IIS...
I can't speak for all of those tools/languages -- I'm certainly not using all of them myself -- but I have used Jython, SQLJ, BSF/BeanShell, and WebL, and can see a use for many of those languages in different situations. Certainly *someone* saw a need for each of them, and languages like Ada, Cobol, Forth, Lisp, Scheme, Pascal, Fortran, TCL, Prolog have their own proponents.
While I know that people are using C# and VisualBasic.NET for .NET development, what other languages are currently available *and being used* for development with .NET and how many applications have been actually deployed using .NET? There are literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of applications deployed on Java/JVM -- that's the REAL difference between .NET and JVM.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
EVERY DAY!
Surely even IIS can't be that bad.
... because they are the work of BILL.
Sorry guys, but I'm engaged in a web-service project now which is a perfect example of how it could be done.
Actually, one of the main reasons for doing it as a web service is so we can supply this stuff to anyone - regardless of platform.
The other reason for making it a web service is (Trust me) you wouldn't want to run this one on you own web server. Not unless you have some serious hardware.
In summary, I figure that if someone else's server can fire me a bunch of XML, I can run a shedload of calculations on the hardware I want then send back the answer as XML, then that's a pretty good thing for diversity in the OS market.
So what if web services are an M$ thing - even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
Great use of popular acronyms, but you're missing the point. A socket library and strings support? No, you obviously haven't worked on a truly ENTERPRISE CLASS web application. It's nto that simple. If you were to spend your time trying to develop an enterprise class system using a development platform that is as basic as you describe, it would cost several times as much, and take several times as long as the current ASP/COM, .Net framework.
And I believe that is ultimately what will decide if this technology stays or leaves. But, Microsoft will win I am sure. Remember there already is a killer app that will be tied to their web services and everything else: MS Office. Sun is pretty much out of the game when it comes to applications people use. Could they transform Staroffice into their killer app? I doubt it.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
but i was telneting to different webservers and found out by accident that netscape.fr is actually an IIS4.0 webserver. telnet to port 80 and to a GET / HTTP/1.0 and see for yourself ... very amusing.
What the heck do I want "web services" for, anyhow?
Until that question is sufficiently answered, this whole question is moot.
When it is answered, legions of open source programmers will solve the problem swiftly.
They always do. Fear not.
Wake up... complacency is Microsoft's best friend. Just assume we're winning already and suddenly we'll find they've stolen the goalposts and the spectators, moved to the next field over, built a stadium & are making millions from the pay-per-view market. Zealotry, and a blind preference for whatever version of the story puts OSS/Free software in the best light, gets us nowhere.
This is very funny. I have got to comment on your views a bit....
The point I agree on is documentation: without this, open source projects will be less able to quickly integrate new contributors to replace those who lose interest in the project.
In conclusion to this long point-by-point response: Microsoft does not PLAY FAIR: OSS cannot win unless the DOJ does something to stop Microsoft. It has little to do with strategy when your opponent has no rules to follow while you are constrained to what is legal/ethical. I just thought up a potential reason for the X-box: the very same .NET vaporware being trotted out. Guess what the clients will be?
It's amazing what corporate types will do when they're playing with other peoples' money.
IIS... It's a telnet/ftp/http server all in one. I think that is what he is trying to say. Of course Apache isn't a webservice, it's just a httpd. Imagine that ;)
Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.
Benchmarks have shown that for typical server applications, modern JVM/JIT combinations are as fast as unoptimized C++ code.
.net, etc, all you want. But don't tell me an interpreted language with garbage collection and bullshit container classes and 1970's i/o is as fast as c++. I write networking code in both languages, and i'm not buying it. Sorry for spelling: late, drunk.
load of crap. they may come close to being speed-equivalent if you write c++ constrained to the language features java supports. That is, you use heterogeneous container classes and downcast all the time, don't use templates or multiple inheritance, use threads where there is no good reason to, and whip expensive exceptions around like you're getting a commision on them.
Oh, and typical server applications?!? If you're writing server applications using a one thread-per-server-scheme, you are nowhere, and you are if you're writing java, cuz it doesn't know from multiplexing, at least in 1.3.
Bash c#,
Just wait till next month's survey and watch Microsoft's market share go down, down, down...
I tried port 80 on some of the hosts in my logfile that were spreading code red, and the vast majority of them are not running a web server anymore. It'll be very interesting to see how many of those hosts were in netcraft's survey.
zope, python, php hell even java is sniffed at by management. zop, erm I dont believe we have a glossy brochure about that on.
we are still trying to rid the network of a horrible netware/nt4 combinatin that never worked but is still implemented, why aren't we using linux? no salemen have pushed it onto management and the Novell certified (tm) network admin probably feels that the currwent setup suits him best.
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - ONLY HARDER!
Yes, documentation is pretty lousy, not to mention also that the kernel dudes shy away from any C++, not that C++ is bad, probably because GCC is so crap at making any usefull bugfree c++ code...
Shame...
GUI is clearly not the way of the future. I mean, look at The Matrix. Cypher clearly explains that a GUI is not sufficient for the purposes of monitoring the matrix itself. Text based solutions will continue to be superior in The Future. ("All I see is redhead, brunette...")
You said you've watched the internet spend 10 years trying to come to terms with the lack of a hosts.txt. Seemed like a very odd statement.
.Net. It's clearly developer centric, just like all their other development tools. It's also clearly not Data centric other than the ADO.NET piece and a realization that most web apps do save/retrieve data using a database.
As far as the HUH? More specifically I was trying to figure out why you had misunderstood Microsoft's
SOAP isn't complex, certainly not compared to COM or CORBA. That's one of the great things about it, it's relative simplicity.
As far as being slow, that's a debatable question. It depends on your bandwidth available, I suppose. That seems to be your point. No more slow than using http to display web pages, and I see no reason why it couldn't take advantage of compression like mod_gzip across the http stream.
The problem with stupid people is that they're stupid. Stupid people aren't competent.
What stupid people who become server admins want is for the server to solve the problems on its own.
Perhaps, eventually, AI research will advance to the point where this is a reasonable expectation. Right now, though, I really don't think so. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
The need for a graphical configuration tool has been acknowledged as important, even in the 2000 OSCon keynote, yet only about 15 people showed up for the Comanche presentation at the same conference. Getting such a tool packaged as part of the standard Apache dist is something that could happen if somebody championed it. There are plenty of choices for anybody motivated to pursue this. Problem is, a good champion would be someone who used a graphical interface him/herself, and most hackers (like me) prefer the text interface.
it's not the EJB technology that sucks, it's these bullshit can-barely-code psuedo-architects who design these ridiculous mega-projects without understanding the proper way to do n-tier development.
YES!! Every waking day I see this crap. You've always got a handful of really talented architects who can see/understand the task and its scope, then you've got your buzz-word-speaking, boot-camp-going, over-hyped, under-educated, just-enough-info-to-be-dangerous, never-coded-a-solid-app, architects who have to contort even the simplest systems.
*deep breath* "halleluiah, where's the aspirin?"
Six months ago, I thought about starting a software company because I saw a problem coming. The next wave of Internet growth will be in Web-based applications. I think we've all grown up and realized that discussion forums with free email are not commercially viable options, but applications that folks (or companies) will pay to use are. Many already exist, but for there to be a boom in this sort of Web application (not to be confused with the overused term "services"), we need a decent development framework (not page generation tools like PHP or web-server control tools like mod_perl, though their like need to play a part).
.Net is an attempt to develop one, and I think it's pretty bad, as it emphasises the same development models as Java, which are fundamentally cool for one developer but a disaster for a 10-year, 20-person development effort which is what any successful application springs from (if you're still mired in the belief that applications spring forth, fully formed from 6-month 1-to-3-person development, just take a look at any stable commercial software application with significant market share. What you start off with after that first six months has to be good, but what it BECOMES over the years must FIT your users and that's what makes or breaks software).
.Net is designed to satisfy the needs of an architecture and of your data, but not of the developer. UNIX has always been a better development environment than anything that Microsoft can put a GUI on, and scalable Web application infrastructures will not be any different.
Right now, there are no options.
What we need is the ability to develop these applications in a scalable and modular way with the components of our choice. I was planning on using a mod_perl-based system as the core framework, but with a set of development tools for any language. Presumably when the Web application market matures, we'll find that language and platform interoperability is still key and C is still the only language that is, itself, language and platform neutral. But, that's only my guess.
What I know is that Microsoft is winning this race because it has no competition. Does that matter? Probably not. Open source efforts almost always get started late. The advantages of coming in after MS screws it up could be large.
I think that MS is missing one large item here (one they always ignore): the developer.
I've worked with the likes of Vignette, and I know that building applications there is a mistake. I've worked with low-level tools like mod_perl, and while I think that mod_perl is fundamentally the best technology for talking to a Web server, it's also very poor for developing applications. Why don't I have a debugger for building Web applications?
Ok, now that I've pissed everyone off or conviced you all I'm a loony, let me really jump off the deep end with a few assertions about the coming age of Web application development:
1. Using HTTP and (may all the little gods defend us) XML to shuttle data between application components is so fundamentally brain-dead, I'm suprised anyone's even taking it seriously. Let's just take a step back and remember that performance and complexity are the reasons that most people didn't like CORBA, and CORBA will soon be made to look light-weight by comparison.
2. You will soon begin to see the dawn of a scary phenomenon: shrink-wrapped, store-shelf Web applications.... Yep. Scary (and probably wrong, but that never stopped anyone).
3. Java is never going to die, but it's about to start entering the COBOL phase. Because it's a poor language? No, in fact it's a pretty cool language. No, Java will begin to atrophy because we've reached a point where the strongest advocates have begun to see projects get mired in the Java platform and its isolation from the rest of the world. The only people left touting Java will be the people who are saying "look at the giant, insulated, institutional system we built" or "look at the tiny self-contained widget frobnitzer" I built, and the next generation of developers are going to get wise to the common thread in those two statements.
Please understand that this rant is the result of 10 years of watching the Internet come to terms with the lack of a HOSTS.TXT. I'm not just jumping into this. I may be wrong in several places, but you should at least have considered these things before you jump of Microsoft's OR open source's band-wagons.
Naysayers of Microsoft and .NET should take heed of this article. The internet is going through another growth shift. It's now moving beyond serving pages.
Linux is a componentized OS. Plug in the parts you want and go. Wouldn't it be great if their was a framework to base applications and services in the same way?
Hence .NET. .NET is not just about subscriptions and ways that Microsoft can charge differently for products. It's about developing a new platform. One in which apps can naturally talk to each other. Data can be distributed and viewed across networks, as seemlessly as opening a local file. .NET is OLE and COM all grown up.
Microsoft was late getting to the internet but this time they're on target if not ahead of the curve. The internet as a medium is now more about communications and distributed data sharing rather than just viewing web pages. Days of the internet being just an online brochure or reference are diminishing. With .NET built into all they're products MS is setting themselves up to repeat history all over again. Put something that is being overlooked into the world with their name on it thus being it's dominant influence. Getting it in the hands of the common user so eventually they think everything should be this way. Will it take 20 some odd years for the world to look and wonder how they got this dominance, then began another crusade to reduce them?
Business and users today want to be able to combine more and more data from different apps together and present it as they want. XML is making this happen. Developers and non-developers want to be able to do this in the language of they're choosing. They want to be able to send the data to others and know they can open and handle it. This is .NET and where things are heading. As the world gets more and more connected people will expect more and more from this connectivity.
As businesses grow and generate more data that must be shared internally and externally they need tools that will allow this. They see that people can look at their websites for informaation. Then after they add databases to them the information becomes more dynamic. As process get more involved so does the methods in which the data gathering and sharing happens. The business world wants it now, and users yesterday. That's why IIS is growing despite it's problems. The data in business doesn't need to be converted but can be used as is.
This isn't a IIS vs Apache or a Windows vs Linux situation. But rather it's I have this data, and I want to do this with it. But I don't want to switch or convert the way it's generated either.
Even though Java's turned into a flop both for standalone client apps (erm, where are they?)
There are actually a lot of them, although I'll grant that they're not widely used. That doesn't mean that they're not good, though. Look at ThinkFree Office for a good example: 100% Java, runs beautifully on all kinds of machines, and is good. I think you can make a credible case that the ThinkFree Office components are far better and more usable than almost all of the "free" office alternatives out there, including all the Gnome and KDE office apps. ThinkFree Office has far better and more bulletproof Microsoft file capabilities than those types of competitors. In fact, except for lacking support for a few advanced things in Excel, like cell notes, conditional formatting, and autofilters, it interoperates flawlessly with the MS world. It's also quite speedy on an old P75 laptop that is otherwise incapable of running office apps.
(BTW: for those that will inevitably gripe that ThinkFree requires a subscription - you're wrong. ThinkFree Office is freely downloadable and usable locally: you only have to pay the subscription fee if you want to use thier backend services, which are good, but a bit overpriced, I think...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
The web has been a bottom up, grass roots phenomena, that is why so many people have web servers and there have been so many startups. That is why Linux and Apache have been able to compete - because things have been bottom up, something that performs well as singleton, individual machines have been competitive.
But the sorts of things that people now expect from the internet has increased dramatically. This is good and necessary, because it means that the internet is a richer, more complex and more interesting place. It means that the ways that we can interact with each other are also becoming richer and more complex. This is part of the vision of the internet that many of us hope for.
But this requires that the open source packages become richer and more complex as well, in order to support the richer and more complex internet.
Folks can complain about how complex things break, and are unreliable, etc... However that is what engineers are supposed to do - deal with complexity, deal with reliability - good engineering is about creating a good solution to a complex problem, not insisting that the problem be dumbed down.
The problem space of conquering the internet now needs a more top down, architectural approach - not just well designed bottom up solutions. This is what Microsoft is doing, but providing a top down architecture in .NET
I think that the article hits the nail right on the head - but the problem for open source is more general than just apache and web services. Open source is being attacked by Microsoft with a top down strategy - Microsoft has an architecture that ties everything together, and has a vision for scalable, complex systems. In the enterprise, this is Active Directory and Exchange Server. In the web business it is .NET.
Meanwhile, the open source world consists of little islands of folks working on small projects that fit into a philosophical/ideological "architecture", but no technical architecture. This is the nature of Open Source's distributed, somewhat anarchistic development model - and it is also the achilles heel that Microsoft has correctly identified and is actively attacking.
Microsoft plans to bury us by _properly_ raising the requirements for complexity and richness, and this making balkanized open source tools irrelevant - and in fact, they don't make us irrelevant, it is the open source community's own hubris, and lack of global vision that will make us irrelevant.
Is there a real open source alternative to Exchange Server? Is there an open source alternative to Active Directory. No and no.
Is it necessary? YES!!! Because in any complex environment, it is control of the core services that glues everything that gives you the "high ground". Microsoft is marginalizing Unix/Linux by taking this high ground in the enterprise, and also taking it over in the web sevices world.
The open source world has lots of programmers and engineers, but not enough architects. And that is what Microsoft is betting on - and every time that somebody says "we don't need web services, we have PHP!", or "Perl is way better than Java!", it just validates that strategy of playing for the technological high ground, and leaving the open source hacks to their efficient, but ultimately MICKEY MOUSE tools.
The world needs more complex, more serious tools. For open source to remain relevant, we need to prove that we aren't just an anarchic bunch of punk coders, but people who actually have the talent, experience and rigor to be architects working for a common technical vision.
Sun may be an evil empire wannabe, but if we sign up with this wannabe, at least we'll be supporting someone who _needs_ us around to fight Microsoft, instead of idiotically making clones of tools from a company that actively wants to squash us. The only reason anyone would want to do this is hubris: to prove we can make a better .NET than Microsoft.
But every enemy that Microsoft has BURIED, has died because they tried to fight a battle on Microsoft's terms. And that is _exactly_ what cloning .NET amounts to. The world needs more complex web services, but not on Microsoft's terms.
Once again, the open source movement is playing bottom up, and they've let Microsoft define the terms of "up".
Wake up folks!
A lot of readers here scoff at web services, and some ways it's nothing more than a more flexible version of RPC for the Internet. But companies that follow the closed source model expand what people think of as useful in software against such skeptics. The skeptics can say they don't need GUIs, component object models, rich data formats like styled text or video, and so on, but in the end the best concepts will win out and then finally the open source front might notice that they have yet another kind of facility to reimplement.
My personal view is that web services based on SOAP will indeed succeed where DCOM and CORBA versions of the "object web" have failed. You don't have to beleive that but I think the best argument is that we already have web services and that there is a lot of value in being in the group that codifes them -- that is, who define how they are described and accessed.
The clue is in the "on my DSL". That's great, you can keep a server stable when you are the only user. Whoop-de-doo.
Apache runs on Windows too. Some of the people in my dorm run it that way and make fun of the people using IIS, especially now after code red.
From what I heard, the nice GUI in OSXS is actually missing a LOT of controls. A lot of items only have an "On/Off" button, not much more. Don't get me wrong, I love OSX (running it since the pb), but this is not it's strongest point =] Of course there's always webmin.... =]
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
True.
The huge, big point here is the thing about J2EE vsSo what? Java and .NET are both 80%-hype and 20%-actual usefulness (in the case of .NET, 20% vapourware....as for Java, I love it, but it's really not the answer to everything)...I think that the Mono project is so incredibly stupid that I have deleted GNOME off my hard disk on principle and have installed KDE 2.1.1.
Clusterable, component-based architecture is where it's heading, and PHP/modPERL/whatever ain't doing it NOW. The corp world has gone n-tier architecture, and other than using Apache to front-end WebLogic/WebSphere/whatever, most open source stuff is far behind.Component-based, clusterable, n-tier, etc etc. Wow. A lot of buzzwords there. Luckily, there is an Open Source solution that is clusterable, object-orientated and object-based, has support for SOAP, XML, XML-RPC and is fully scalable (yes, it runs on any architecture with a C compiler and a Python port). It also integrates very easily with other systems and can practically be used and extended to do anything thanks to the source code being open. You know what I'm talking about - Zope.
Don't even WASTE your time whining about where they got their numbers on Apache - figure out what to do to address the big picture of web services. What do we got? Not much, JBoss is it as far as I know of for non-vaporware offerings. Tomcat is cool, but it only does servlets and JSP - Tomcat is NOT a bean container. Beans (way stupid, misleading name) are the componentized pieces of code that are needed to beatWow, you're either trolling here (congrats, +5 indicates a pretty good troll. Check out Zope. Zope products and ZClasses make pretty reusable code...this technology has been out since 1999. You obviously don't "know of" all that much. As for Apache's lost market share, well, I won't waste my time worrying about it - neither will anyone else that uses it. A lot of the people I've talked to running IIS have been thinking seriously about changing over to Apache in these last few weeks.
He nailed it on the head - The same way we've been harping about the world changing and rendering Microsoft irrelevant, the way the Open Source world does things is pretty much irrelevant and obsolete as well.Yer losing me, Janeway...
His point about finishing the Open Source versions of j2EE (like way quickly now too) is pretty much the only way we are not going to fall behind. We don't have the time to architect some beautiful dream, we need to shit or get off the pot NOW, it's starting to stink in here!I love Java. I'd be very happy if everyone started using it, but I thought I'd just point out that a lot if it IS hyped, and for some things, I actually prefer to use other systems. The great thing is that with complex systems, you aren't tied to one development tool or system. With stuff like Python out there (or Perl), you could write your system in a variety of languages and use glue components to tie them together into one coherent system. That's what I often do, and in fact, on the Intranet running at work, the setup looks something like this: An Apache/FreeBSD front end, with a Zope/FreeBSD server running behind it through ProxyPassReverse, and a Debian GNU/Linux box running the latest JDK behind it and running Tomcat.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
It's ALL based on W3C standards, you stupid fucking moron! Go look up WSDL sometime. Imbecile.
Dude, I don't know if you've done any benchmarks, but Tomcat sucks royally. It's about 1/3-1/5 the speed of JRun and Jetty, the latter of which is available free of charge for non-commercial use.
Tomcat v3.3 (in beta now) is a performance release to Tomcat, and improves things a lot. But it's still quite a bit slower than Jetty & JRun.
Tomcat v4.0 has the promise of working better. It's got the right architecture. Craig McClanahan, the chief architect, deserves big kudos for laying things out nicely, and writing really good code. But it's still in beta, too. I haven't done any benchmarks since beta 1 (before any performance tuning, IIRC), but it was pretty slow back then--slower than Tomcat v3.2.
All I mean to say is that Tomcat is a very poor implementation of a servlet engine. It is the reference. It does work reliably. But it is not very efficient.
If you've got a commercial site, use Jetty or JRun.
--Be human.
I understand that, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that there already is development on the J2EE technologies as far as open-source goes. I have them running in a production environment right now. Maybe more marketing could help; JBoss is a very nice product, and its integration with Tomcat is superb, but nobody seems to know about it. I think there's plenty of room for the Monos and dotGnus out there. The author tried to say that OSS is losing because there's not enough web service-type development available, but that's just false.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
ket. I happily await .NET and all this ecommerce hype. I will also happily watch as it fails to make anything easier. I will also be happy when security wise a flaw is found and the cat is outta the bag. Microsoft has never been known for their security, they have never been known to produce reliable software. I don't know where all this "fear" in the opensource community actually comes from but if you're sacred; don't be. Nothing will come of .net/mono or whatever else is being spun to ultimately make things easier and more unified. That's the total opposite of the way the net itself works. Writing some wrapper for "services" isn't gonna make things easier.
.NET!! Wooooooo Woooooo
By the way my site is down do to the codered worm. My isp had to block port 80 for a little while. Can't wait for
No, that's what Sircam is for... *SHEESH*, talk about off-topic!!!!
PHOOEY!!!
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
Actually, I think the point of the article was that the author doesn't understand open source. Open source is driven by needs, not markets. When someone needs an open web service, that's when the open source movement will create one. As long as it's just Microsoft sniffing vapours, there's no need for the software.
One of the strengths of open source is that people build what they can use, they don't waste their time trying to figure out what someone else might have a use for, maybe.
The open source movement has no interest in creating markets, they have an interest in creating software that allows people to do the stuff they want or need to do.
"Web services" just seems to be an annoying buzz word for some stuff that some software might do, without any substance on what exactly a web service is... I mean if it's a hyperlinked database, which is what the best description seems to imply, then it's hardly a "killer app".
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Not when this "growth area" is a bunch of B.S.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Even if Apache is the ultimate web server, if a web server isn't what we need now then why add app server features to apache? If Tomcat is the apache app server project, maybe it makes more sense to add the missing server features to it.
From the tomcat install instructions on coniguring with apache:
Rather than trying to get app server features into Apache why not get the first 3 of these into Tomcat? Especially 2 and 3, 1 might not matter because there are not too many of these in the kind of sites Tomcat is geared for.4 days? That seems like an awful waste of time and money. What's that, like $500-$1000? Mind if you post the name of your employer, I think I know a person who would save him some time and money... ;)
I think you make a number of good points, but in the end Microsoft's great power comes down to two things: persistence and marketing. They don't give up, they stay on point, and they keep whacking away.
Open source can meet or exceed one of Microsoft's great virtues: persistence. As long as there are handful of programmers committed to Apache, it will never go away.
The great remaining advantage Microsoft has is marketing. Examples:
First impressions. They understand the value of first impressions much better than Open Source. Prime example: MS Access. It is amazing the sheer number of people who are struggling with the shortcomings of this product. But it makes certain things very easy at the outset, so that people get it in their heads that "Access is easy". When they are inevitably mired in the defects of the product, they perceive the underlying problems as hard. A consistent pattern in Open Source is to shortchange initial impressions for long term utility -- to reduce TCO. Which is fine but people judge TCO by their first impressions.
Hype: Now exactly what is it the ".net" does that you can't do with CORBA? Somehow they've convinced people that XML and SOAP are magic pixie dust. Open Source people of course have their own propensity to hype, but they hype things that matter to them not the customers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
At least it bought me a good laugh...
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
hahahha! that is why COM+ is going the way of the dodo. VB is the messy patchwork. If you run enterprise class websites on IIS you don't know wtf your talking about.
Rewriting your entire application is a moronic waste of time and money. Only naive developers blame their problems on their tools.
Dear CmdrTaco et al, can we please, please, please have some new moderation options? I propose (-1, Too Many Buzzwords) for this one.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
For one, PHP doesn't allow you to seperate presentation logic from business logic. There is no natural way to deploy reusable (distributed) components, ...
J2EE gives you a unified framework (distributed components, security, persistence, transactions) from the web front to the back office.
The fact that most people here don't understand the importance of GUI in today's world is good. It means that I will have a long and fruitful employment designing applications while most slashdotters will be working at CompUSA.
I can't believe this mindset. When was the last time you started your car by turning a crank in the front? Isn't it much nicer to just turn the key? Of course, turning the crank may teach you about how the starter works, but in today's world with an overload of information, I don't particularly care about that detail!
There is a lot of "I can do so much more with the command line than I can with a GUI" statements here, but people tend to ignore the advantages of a simple drag&drop operationg over remembering cumbersome command line options.
Since we are on the subject, here is my top 5 failures of linux, in no particular order.
1. Utter reliance on the command line. Please. Let me manage the system with drag and drop. A picture is indeed worth a thousand command line options.
2. Source code distributions. Sure, they are nice if you are a hacker, maybe even if you are a programmer, but most users could care less. They want to be on their way in a few minutes, not sit through fifteen minutes of recompiling and have to deal with cryptic compiler messages.
3. Consistent look and feel. I vote for KDE, but I realize others have their opinions. In the end however, it's not the WM/desktop, it's the consistency within the WM/desktop. The reason why I like KDE is that it leverage's Microsoft's research into usability factors.
4. The users. Linux users need to grow up and understand the needs that the public at large has. No, knowing obscure linux terminology and command line options does not make you special, it makes you a nerd. That is fine and dandy, be proud. However in order for linux to win (whatever that means) it has to be usable by non-nerds too.
5. Management. Managing linux is a pain. Too many silly little config files and too many binary locations. Determining what's on a box and installing/uninstalling applications is a pain too. At least compared to windows.
Namezero, like every other registrar has tens and thousands of domain names which lead to their pages. May be they all point to the same server. If that one (or a few ) server gets changed to IIS that many sites will cgahge to IIS too, automatically. While the point of the article is well taken, the underlying data looks questionable
Desi Noise, Live!
Exactly which open source companies are "losing their asses"? As far as I know, the ones losing their asses are those dot coms without business plans and lots of hype (this is a lesson that you can see people anything) and nothing tangible. It still amazes me that people poured billons of dollars into the ideas of people who could only do a nice powerpoint presentation and give that aura of confidence. Idiots.
You mean SQL server has clustering? That works without the need to re-write your application? And it scales? Can I put my 27terabyte data warehouse on it?
I wonder if the drop in Apache market share has anything to do with people getting Win2k and mistakenly installing IIS on it. I seem to be getting about 810 requests per week from infected IIS Servers, prolly from people who are clueless.
Sorry, but Microsoft can't make it work. They can't even make a program on one device stop crashing, much less running them across networks.
I believe that you are correct about implementing J2EE in competition with .NET. Your arguments and the arguments of Prasad suggest that Java is David's weapon against Goliath. What really convinces me that this is true (sort of icing on the cake) is that Microsoft has said that they will not be including the Java Virtual Machine in Windows XP. I think the folks at Microsoft are thinking along the same lines.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain
Where is the linux powerful ? ...
Where are you proud of the linux ?
Server side !
What is Microsoft trying to do ?
To rule the server side !
Who did invent web services ?
Microsoft + IBM +
It is not a question if it will
or not happen, but when !
I don't see Open Source away from
the card table, but it may not
give the cards anymore.
A:This month Apache did have lost a big share on the Web. But that's not the first time it happened and it is frequent to see it recover steadly the lost track.
.NETs and SOAPs. And the technology is not offering nothing real, killerapp and blow your enemy. So only hot air may help it bloat. However baloons tend to blow. Well, it's bad anyway but it's better than preaching All Mighty Gates for the rest of your life.
B: Why the author did not note that M$ does also suffers of this? In Mars or April BigSoft did also lost a large share of Web servers. And it also recovered.
C: Web apps? Does anyone gets the idea of what is this and what will lead to? I don't wanna say that Web apps are Bad Thing (TM). But I believe there is a lot of whoopla about this. Too much indeed. Some people also predicted the dead of Unix because of the lack of "normal" GUIs and that now we would all look the Web through Internet Explorer.
D: There is a crisis going on. Has anybody noted it? And it is natural that things will slow down. And this seems to concern volunteer work doesn't it? Well people need to care to eat...
E: M$=The World in 20 years? Two years ago I would agree. Now, I'm sure that even if they get near it, then they will blow it up. They made too much air in these XPs
Are there any reasoned estimates on how many people work on various M$ projects versus how many work on the multitudes of 'open' projects?
Has anyone described the methods that M$ and 'open' teams use to provide interoperability and ease of use (reliability?) to products?
I imagine one group has more 'middle managers' than the other, but the other group may have a complementary form of overhead.
</rhet>
Their they're doing there hair.
Just like Ximian...
OK, here's a primer, this is how M$ plays and wins: It names the game, makes the rules, then breaks them.
"Our market research shows this is what the customer want. This is how to do that." Once everyone play the game, they break the rules. Unfortunately for them, sometimes they break the law in the process.
Where M$ catches people, as has been said, is they get them to stray from their core competency. The developers waste all their resources. M$ has much more resources than anyone else. M$ wins.
Homey don't play that game.
No flame intended. But.
Microsoft's new "technologies" (which I put in quotes because what they call a "technology" is usually just a new implementation of features) always look cool in demos and books. You don't find out about the hidden "features" until you actually develop a reasonably large project.
I'll give one tiny example since it's on my mind right now. Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) provides a function CoCreateInstanceEx, which takes a parameter indicating the DNS name or IP address of the remote host where you want a new COM object to be instantiated. Neato! It's like RPC but with type safety! As long as the remote host is configured to let your host do so, you can instantiate and use a DCOM object anywhere on the Internet or your private network. Not really a new idea, strictly speaking, but nice nonetheless.
But there's an annoying catch. You can't specify your own hostname or IP address. If you want to instantiate a COM object on your own host, you either have to pass a NULL to CoCreateInstanceEx or just call CoCreateInstance (without the "Ex") instead.
It's no big deal, but it breaks perfectly reasonable code for no reason. Gratuitous non-orthogonality.
I love Linux and other free software, and I'm a vocal Microsoft critic, but that doesn't mean I write this stuff out of ignorance. I've been programming in Windows since the 3.0 release, and have recently been spending probably about two-thirds of my work time programming various Win32 projects, from end-user database applications with CA-Visual Objects (anybody even heard of that?) to the C++ middle tier of a couple of 3-tier client/server systems. I don't hate the stuff, I just have plenty of practical knowledge of how it sucks.
COM (and DCOM--"Distributed COM") is littered with barely-documented or undocumented details like these. Like the way strongly-typed parameters can be passed by reference across process boundaries--just not from Visual Basic clients, even though COM is claimed to be language-neutral.
Microsoft development tools, I've found, generally stop doing what you expect the moment "gee-whiz!" settles into "can you make it do this?" When you read Microsoft docs or third-party books on a new "technology" it pays to be skeptical whenever the CS student inside your head says, "That's amazing! How can they do that?"
I guess I'm saying two things:
If you write a few pretty decent-sized .NET applications and they work out as well as expected, super. But until then, I'd withhold judgement.
My feeling is that a dedicated group of Java fans needs to get involved in Mono, and promote Java as a first class citizen alongside C#. Heck, the open source community already has a Java compiler that's miles ahead of the Mono C#/CLR combo. It shipped as part of gcc 3.0.
While Java was not submitted to ECMA, Sun has stated that anyone is free to implement it based on the open specification as long as the "Java" brand isn't mentioned. This is quite similar to the Mesa 3D library vis a vis OpenGL, and Mesa has been quite successful. Further, Sun and IBM have both provided high quality VMs and development kits for Linux.
Java (despite all of Microsoft's spin to the contrary) is still growing in popularity, and is the dominant technology in several important areas. Over 100 million Java enabled phones should ship this year, for instance. Java is also dominant in the application server arena. Sun is still investing heavily in desktop Java (most of the 1.4 release is aimed at an improved client side experience), and MacOS X proves that Java on the client can be very nice. In fact, another area that could really use work is simply better integrating Swing applications into the Gnome/Ximian desktop.
As a final point, Sun has stated that it has no problem open sourcing Java at some point...when it is clear that Microsoft won't co-opt the platform with it's famous 'embrace and extend' tactics. C# is the latest (weak) attempt to do so. The best thing you can do to prevent .NET (.NOT!) from taking over e-commerce is to learn Java, and leverage the tremendous amount of high quality Java code out there to write great cross-platform web applications.
Extra credit for client side development...check out the Grand Canyon Demo for inspiration...it is pretty awesome!
186,282 mi/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
This is off a bit but most of these comments are so here goes. I have long felt that the Internet, and thus all things web such as web servers, will be the model for interstellar space exploration and colonization. For example, a hub/switch/gateway representing docking stations or actual communication outposts. So Microsoft being a big influence now would naturally enter into this equation and make its presence felt in this future manifestation. So if you don't want to have your grandchildren working in crystal mines in the bowels of some moon wearing MS overalls...
That is why they created ZPT (Zope Page Templates). ZPT makes it possible for web designers to use their GUI products and the programmers to put the code in XML markup. ZPT is brand new but Zope Corp. has announced that all their future projects will use it instead of DTML.
But I'm doing exactly what you say using Perl/CGI. I've got a nice object-oriented framework for handling interaction with the various parts of the business, and it works great. So, what am I missing out on? I'm handling a reseller network, our own ERP functionality, workflow, online store including our own and our reseller's pricing, multiple views of our assemble-to-order items (resellers are too dumb to price assemble-to-order, so we have to make it look different), etc. What am I missing, or what would "web services" simplify compared to what I'm doing now?
Engineering and the Ultimate
"Hi. My name is John... and I have no understanding of the proper way to do n-tier development".
I've always wondered about what the issues here were... I have no experience with anything beyond some very simple client server apps. Would you be inclined to point out print or online resources that could give me a point in the right direction?
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Thanks for the info, namezero is a big zero in my book.
Håll käften, äckliga danskjävel!
Notice I didn't way they're invincible. I said they have a good formula for nibbling away at markets that makes them look that way. As long as they keep taking small bites, they "leverage their monopoly," and are darned close to invincible, though.
Laying over and playing dead, like their competitors of the past isn't the answer. But neither is getting rolled over, kicking and fighting. The answer is to have a smarter battle plan, recognizing their strengths and weaknesses.
I HATE putting it this way. "Battle Plan" Perhaps that's what I dislike most about Microsoft. They engender this attitude in others, because they are continually at war.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Check out JOnAS, which serves as the core for Enhydra. Both are functional, real-world application servers.
Check out Exolab, consisting of OpenEJB, OpenJMS, OpenORB, and more. Again, this is another open-source application server.
For web services, check out Apache SOAP. The wonderful folks at IBM have gifted the open source community with a SOAP/WSDL/UDDI implementation. There was some talk a while back about JBoss integrating Apache SOAP into its offerings, although the mailing list now causes me to doubt this.
Of course, I'm taking Mono and dotGNU.
What does all this add up to? It looks to me that Mono and dotGNU provide migration paths for existing MS customers. J2EE provides a software scalability that is not possible with Microsoft application servers. Between Sun, SGI, and IBM, the MS/Intel hegemony don't stand a chance with respect to hardware scalability. And with JBoss, Microsoft can't compete on price. It seems to me that the Unix camp will do quite well with this whole web services thing.
That said, it's not like one side will win while the other side loses. No matter what happens, MS will have a sizable camp of die-hard devotees. Likewise with the Unix camp. Somewhere in between, web services will support mixed solutions. Throw in non-MS implementations of the CRE, and the current quality of Java under Windows (it's still better than Linux...and, yes, I have tried the IBM VM), and we've got a situation where the underlying platform is really not that important. Finally, I'll get to focus on what I do best (programming), while avoiding all the religious hype surronding MS vs. Unix.
--Be human.
my one problem with java...it seems that _all_ java implementations are sorely lacking in a halfway decent install system. as a sysadmin who does lots of server installs, the last thing i need is to have to spend an extra 30-60mins futzing around on a system getting java/jsp/tomcat/whatever support up and running.
./configure; make; make install?
has sun never heard of
you want greater acceptance of java-based apps? tighten up the installs, make them intuitive (to sysadmins), make them manageable.
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
You're goning with Zope? Program your stuff with Python.
Me
I expect to see more of these alarmist stories coming from Linuxtoday. They abandoned astroturfing after they were caught redhanded and now their new recipe is: 1. Take a "fact" with Linux community trolling potential. 2. Create a story/"guest column"/whatever around it with wild claims of doom for free/open software, Linux, etc. 3. Publish... and the high inflammability of the Linux community does the rest.
I think the point of the GUI is to decrease the learning curve. The fact of the matter is that there are alot of Post-DOS and UNIX computer users out there and they are intimidated by a pure command line or text environment. Apache needs to bridge the generation gap, and that goes for Linux too.
it's really sad
this post cleanly illustrates precicely what is wrong with linux/unix/unix administrators, and -- by extension -- linux/unix/non-ms operating systems in general.
we come across as fucking arrogent, especially when we are right.
this is what i took from this post:
now, i'm positive that much of the post was written in frustration (lord knows, i feel it every day working with these windows people... they're so... needy!) but this is just a glimpse on why we're not reaching the users.
some simple things the admin could have done
the point is, this boss, as difficult as he seems to be, is acting out of his own fear, uncertainty, and doubt. this situation could have avoided; i know that sounds cliche and i don't know all the facts, and this guy is probably just as big of a stuipid prick as he sounds, but i don't feel anything except unhappy that there is some guy making decisions at a company, a guy who believes that linux is a problem that needs to be removed from his network.
just as important: there is now one less linux install in the world. no, i'm not going to get all "bleeding-heart" over linux installs, but dammit, aren't we talking about just that! linux or apache or open-source or howevermany non-crap.NET installs vs. microsoft's offerings. i really feel for the guy with the piggish boss, but if things had been handled differently, the box could still be there. and maybe more linux boxes in the future if the thing performs well... i know, i'm dreaming a little.
anyway, we've gotta lose this atitude of "we're just better because it's obviously not winning us any friends...
--
Eric Markham
Well, perhaps I should have been more clear...
.NET from plain ol' ASP 3.0.
.DLL's with the C# compiler, or using any of the features that caught my eye while reading.
;-)
.DLL updating, in-process caching features, and automatic garbage collection for a web app is a huge leap from traditional web dev. ASP.NET actually makes the web a "real" platform for developing "real" applications, instead of a collection of scripts that need to have every bit of functionality built into them from the ground-up just to work right.
I picked up the book a few weeks ago, to go along with the SDK 2.0 we installed on our dev server this week. I haven't just been "reading" the book, but starting to convert some of our applications over to
So far, I have noticed nothing in the conversion process that has raised any dysfunctional red-flags whatsoever. I have had no problem taking huge blocks of ASP code and shrinking it down to 10 ASP.NET lines, making my own
Sure, I'm positive that it will have flaws. But, heck, what doesn't? Don't try to tell me that PHP and Perl don't have flaws, because you're just asking for a beating there.
Quite honestly, I don't mind writing, say, someting like CoCreateInstance instead of CoCreateInstanceEx every once and a while if the platform as a whole allows me much more development flexibility than any of the others.
I'm not sure if you're very aware of the web-development scene right now...But having a platform that has state-management, 1st-run compilation of code, on-the-fly
What's a sig?
Of course, having nice tools help, but tools are helpless if there is no consistent architecture underneath. The reason why Java is the best bet for an alternative to Microsoft's web services is that Sun bothered to define architectures like Java Beans. Same thing goes for Open Scripting Architecture and perhaps the AppKit stuff from Apple.
Wow. The propaganda show really got to you. Well, I have been creating e-commerce / dynamically driven web sites for a while now, and I have to say that there are different tools for different applications. For most jobs apache is great. If you have to run a transaction manager (with cashing / pooling), both fall short (unless you are going to write one yourself). And java, while very good at server-side html / dynamic web page generation is not the only language out there. I have seen some pretty bloated, over engineered java programs. Mostly because java is easy to learn, while good programming/engineering is not. J2EE is not really a robust web server. It is designed to support java applications. Just my 2c.
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
If they pull off this transition, desktop Linux will become a footnote in the history books. Linux on the server will still be around, but it will be second rate compared to Windows, since MS will do whatever is needed to make sure it works out that way.
Face it, MS is not only more devious than Linux people realize, they're more devious than Linux people can possibly imagine.
The whole point about web serving is that it is a standard. When you browse to a web site you don't care which code served it. Web serving is a commodity.
Microsoft has gained its monopoly and retains it because of network effects. The final aim of M$ is to control the servers as well as the desktop. IIS is the means through which it gets there. On its own IIS is just a web-server, a commodity. So to increase market share in the server space it is turning this piece of commodity into something which has value-add. Basically M$ wants IIS to have a network effect because of the extra services added. Because of these extra services people WILL start to care which software is serving the pages.
It is all about network effects. Apache has a huge installed base. We (freedom-loving people everywhere) should add value added services to Apache. Even better, use an existing framework or build one that allows the open source community and anyone else who wants to to offer services. Make these services compelling. Create lock-in. We must fight like M$ fight, yes even get our hands dirty.
Another thouht which worries me: M$ already controls the desktop. What are they waiting before they install a competing network stack to TCP/IP. There was this article (I think it was on Byte.com) which laid out the dangers if M$ were to eventually drop TCP/IP on clients and install their own stack. M$ would then truly control the internet.
(Hope what i said makes sense. my email is brian@m-commerce.com)
I agree with your post in that "Web Services" are sold like they are magical and yet all they really are is XML over HTTP to a SOAP spec. However that's not the end of the story.
.NET to do Web Services on Windows? Man it is -so- easy, you'll wet yourself. It's not that you can't do Web Services today on Linux, it's how easy you can incorporate Web Services into everything you do.
.NET frameworks makes accessing Web Services a piece of piss. Hell, you don't even need to know SOAP -or- XML. I can write and consume a Web Service using Visual Studio .NET in like 5 minutes.
How easy is it to develop and locate these services on Linux today? Have you seen/used Visual Studio
The
Sure I sound like a MS sellout, but shit... it's good stuff if you ask me.
Linux needs to be able to come up with high productivity tools to do this kind of stuff in no matter what languages etc you use before it will gain any more share than with the hard core techs.
.. it's a nice article, yea. And probably most of it is true.
But i always ask myself whether we need to conquer the market, if we need to build things the managers like. Or if we want to make things _we_ like.
I mean - whatfor does the world (including managers, they just dont know it:) need web applications and web services and all this crap?? Does it increase productivity? I dont believe this. I dont believe at all that computers have been necessaery in the first point. Yea, now they are, cause we integrated them into our lifes. But i think mostly they are just for fun.
So let's write applications for fun - not for managers!
J.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I.
Prasad's well-considered article touches on several points which proponents of open source as a movement and advocates of prominent open source projects, like GNU/Linux, would do well to take note of; in actuality, a great deal more is at stake here than .NET vs. J2EE or IIS vs. Apache. At the risk of sounding alarmist, I should like to suggest that the very paradigm for the interaction between the human populations of developed nations and their machine populations will be greatly influenced by the computing landscape as it develops in the next decade or so. Whether corporations and end users will continue to enjoy a degree of control and choice in their computing habits, or have their needs and the fulfillment of those needs dictated to them will critically depend on the success of open source and free software as ideologies, which in turn rests upon the success of their fruits as viable solutions to the real and perceived problems which increasingly omnipresent technological hooks present. There are several core problems facing free software in the immediate future, but ultimately I think success or failure will rest heavily on the ability to solve a sort of meta-problem: recalcitrance towards strategic thinking. Though it should be an obvious oversimplification to consider the present situation solely a conflict between Microsoft and Linux, it is probably accurate to posit that Microsoft will come to exercise an unparalleled dominance over computing and influence over every major technological aspect of our comfortable industrialized-nation existence in short order unless a significant impediment is made to the development of Microsoft's strategy of alternating diversification and market consolidation. GNU/Linux and its allies are poised to be just such a monkey, er, penguin wrench; but it is simultaneously poised to become just another footnote in computational history, like the mach kernel, or, so it increasingly seems, BSD UNIX. What will determine the outcome? In large part, I think the ultimate success or failure of the technologies that are the product of open source, and hence reductively of the ideologies inherent therein, is coupled to the success or failure of the participants to see the big picture, and begin to actively strive to first map out, then win the battle against Microsoft; the technical ability is already present in the community, but the strategic thinking is largely absent. Whether the immediate goal was writing free clones of UNIX utilities (GNU), the UNIX kernel (Linux), or more recent developments like usable desktops or office suites (Gnome, KDE, Koffice), the goal was one that could be clearly visualized and accomplished; and already has been to varying degrees. The problem is, Microsoft doesn't work like that. It isn't an informal and arbitrary collection of loosely defined groups of individuals working on conflicting and overlapping projects. Despite arguably mediocre managerial practices, it is an enormous organization with well-defined and considered top-level objectives with comparatively immeasurable resources. It furthermore has the advantage of market dominance, and unlike most Linux-based endeavours, is not ethically handicapped by a commitment to open standards, open source, or open-mindedness about the requirements of their user base. The outstanding fact is that despite all this, free software has managed to move from a position of relative obscurity to become one of the few things Microsoft still genuinely worries about in the post-commercial-unix apocalypse. Unless there are fundamental shifts in the behavioural patterns of free software developers and users in the near term, however, Microsoft will go about radically changing the model by which people use software and simultaneously open up whole new avenues for revenue while free software users fall about trying to touch up their favourite desktop environment and begging hardware vendors to release specifications so that they can continue to write drivers for a hobbyist's OS. Free software will fade to irrelevancy as Microsoft and perhaps a few other companies become first the software provider for the world, and then a sort of extranational exchequer: Microsoft will levy a tax for your subscription based OS and core tools at first, but will then concentrate on taxing each use of Microsoft-run identification registries for a beleaguered but optionless public's increasingly e-commerce based lives. The usual scenarios outlined by even clumsy print journalists now come into play: one pays a percentage to one's broker, and a percentage to the service broker (Microsoft) every time one trades stock online; for the convenience of making dinner reservations securely over the web or ordering a book, the restaurant or bookseller gets the majority of your money, but a service transaction fee will be levied by a company that positions itself to be an integral part of all network-computing and e-commerce transactions: i.e. Microsoft. This will not come to pass if the software and services are free, but the more important thing to realize is that it is sufficient to ensure that no one corporation or cartel is broadly positioned enough to make such total dominance possible. Presently I think the last, best hope against a Microsoftian winter is open source software. The proposition of policy which comes out of this is that co-ordination is necessary on a scale which free software developers are unused to. Critical goals must be identified, and fulfillment of those goals distributed among what are now a multitude of largely uncommunicating projects. Moreover, and I admit this may be contentious even to those who do not find the remainder of this material so, absolutism in approach or ideology must be absolutely discarded. Prasad is absolutely right to upbraid free software advocates for a failure to approach a rapport with Sun and Java, and conversely, Sun needs to cease to regard Linux with latent hostility and genuinely regard free software developers as allies rather than as a threat to Sun's own platform, OS, and technologies. It is a far more difficult assignment to identify a prescriptive solution to this problem than to merely identify it: clearly no one wants a Grande Empereur d'Linux or a Linux High Command, but perhaps a semipermanent consortium of representatives from free software projects and sympathetic industry partners to discuss and co-ordinate long-term development strategies would suffice. One may guess at what might be successful, but a more centralized nervous system of some sort is necessary in an environment where diversity of development means duplicated effort comingled with unexplored territory as well as the ability to choose between 25 different window managers. I sincerely hope that some few people with greater influence than I choose to cogitate on these matters and are motivated to action.
--
I apologise for the length of my remarks as well as their poor organization. Recent unemployment has disposed me to involved but undirected thought.
Sorry, I must be missing something. Why is this a troubling picture? If web services are good for something, and potentially they are, why is that a problem? If they provide a better answer than Open Source, so what? If it's better, it's better. Open Source is not a Good Thing just because it's Open source. If the web services answer is not better, no-one's stopping you from continuing to use Open Source principles to produce something that is better.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So, the attitude of Microsoft Developers is so much better? I recently did so work using MS's Speech SDK and on visiting their news server to look for help, I noticed lots of complaints on the attitude of those wonderful developers (specifically mis/noninformation about support in VB). And what about tech support's suggestion that you reformat/reinstall (and maybe lose data) because they did not ship the product without those glaring bugs?
If OSS fails, it will probably be because MS launched an attack of FUD (which bit them in the ass when it was revealed that FreeBSD is still very much at hotmail).
It's all uncharted territory. MS would like for .NET to catch on because A) it would greatly strengthen their server side role, and B) it would allow them to gradually shift their focus from selling software to renting services (providing a much steadier income without the necessity of coming up with and sucessfully marketing new versions of their products).
However, this doesn't mean that Web Services is going to actually take off. Some poor sap (with a big pile of money) thought that FED-EXing catfood around the country was a good idea, it didn't make pets.com a winner.
Just remember, Microsoft also thought that people were going to want to use Microsoft Bob.
Now, I am not saying that the idea of web services is completely bogus. I just know that the cool parts of this concept will almost certainly be available to Free Software hackers in plenty of time to meet customer demand. The reason for this is simple. Free Software hackers are right on the forefront of actually building solutions. Microsoft is busy building a product that they hope others will turn into solutions. There's a big difference.
Asses
As I recall Solaris has a nice GUI tool to add remote printers to a machine. However, root access is required to use it. Is that bad?
And if a user is missing a printer, the admin can always login (even remotely) and add it.
I also remember looking into using LDAP for user acounts, authentication, etc. for Solaris. Except *maybe* for Solaris 8 the whole process is undocumented and unsuported. Meanwhile, it is now part of the Windows 2000 architecture.
Where was Microsoft when few years ago we were trying to integerate Windows machines into a SUN network. They did not support NIS, NIS+ or NFS. AFAIK they still don't.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I believe that the reason for the myths about Java speed are created by poorly coded applications (Dynix WebPac, anyone?). Applications with a start time around 5 minutes on a machine any slower than a gigahertz. It would be amazing if something were ever to be done about this, and it would improve the reputation of Java immensely.
Actually its funny that you should say that. When you do get to broadband you will find that the earth has already been scorched. Slashdot, like most major media refuses to run stories on how the major broadband ISPs are blocking random ports at random times. In particular lately there have been tons of stories on code red, but nothing about BY FAR its biggest fallout. AT & T has blocked incoming port 80, completely refusing to justify and widely advertise its action.
Those of use that remember, are starting to have painful flashbacks to the times when you had very little choice in phone services. The breakup really did nothing to improve that. It merely replaced regional monopolies with slightly smaller monopolies, while at the same time providing political cover to say something was actually done.
As usual, slashdot, prints random tidbits that some monkey stubled on, but the only real editor we have is the emotionally unstable John Katz, who help no-one.
Take this personaility test.
DNS doesn't tell if a machine is a webserver or not. It just tells on which ip-number the machine can be found, and then you'll have to check port 80 to see if it's a webserver. And even dial-ups are registered in DNS, otherwise lot's of things wouldn't work and/or be very slow (e.g. any site running tcpwrappers does a DNS-lookup on every connection).
--[snip]--
Microsoft gains around five and a half per cent of Web hosts this month, and almost two per cent of active sites. Primarily this is a result of two large US installations converting from Solaris. The large free hosting company, Namezero, hosted on the Exodus network, has migrated its front-end systems to Windows 2000, as has part of the Network Solutions domain registration system. Network Solutions has moved physically from Digex to Interland [where Microsoft held a minority interest, prior to the sale to Micron] as part of the process.
--[snip]--
I've had my Windows NT/2000 (upgraded) online nonstop (on my DSL) for 4 years now WITHOUT problem.
Maybe he was just confused. After all, having to work with WinNT as a server must make the hours feel like days...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
1. Using HTTP and (may all the little gods defend us) XML to shuttle data between application components is so fundamentally brain-dead, I'm suprised anyone's even taking it seriously.
I couldn't agree more - the only people to benefit are Cisco ('cos we will all need faster networks and routers) and Intel ('cos XML is processor intensive to parse). No wonder these two are keepting schtum and not jumping on the bandwagon and saying how wonderful it is - they know this too.
The only problem is, is that no one is going to fix CORBA, so we will be stuck with the new slower technology. What we really need is for one of the big CORBA vendors, like Iona, to re-market CORBA, as it is perfectly capable of providing the equivalent of web services, its just that no-one is thinking 'out of the box'.
'The best thing about deadlines is the wonderful WHOOSHing sound they make as they go by.' - Douglas Adams
sorry but if you cant understand an apache configuration within 4 days of mucking about in the httpd.conf file then you really need to get a different job. Apache is extremely simple to configure compared to the power it gives you. and if you want to learn it quickly.. recompile and install mod_perl and php by hand into your apache server. you will learn things about your server that MCSE's only dream about (nightmares I believe!) and you will be able to track down smaller problems or add monstrous abilities with little effort.
sorry, you can keep your GUI. I want my servers to take effort and some knowlege to configure. if you can point and click through an install then you are asking for a poorly configured server.
Could not disagree with you more. X is old-- and has been continuously developed. The first version of X is over 16 years old iirc. It moved into markets which offered the consistant user interface you mention over and over because it had a good architecture. Part of having the good architecture was making that architecture extensible so you could plug in an engine to give windows certain behavior. X will likely continue to do well, IMO, though perhaps home users will do better with a frame buffer than an X server... Office environments stand a lot to gain from X's network transparent architecture.
How many other computer programs span decades of constant development?
One has to laugh at this story though... Two large companies switch from Sloaris to Windows and suddenly it is the end of Open Source...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
there are more Win2K server installs than Linux server installs, at least more than the subset of distros that install Apache by default.
more Linux server installs also are done by technically inclined people who don't just click defaults randomly. :)
these two factors tend to support the claim that M$ enabling IIS by default would enhance its marketshare more than Linux distros bundling Apache.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Okay, agreed that Jakarta is cool -- BUT. You missed the point in a big way, and you have a glaring error of fact in your comment.
Tomcat is excellent, but there is no such thing as a J2EE servlet engine, and you characterizing it as such is doing both Tomcat and Ganesh's article a disservice. The fact is that a servlet/JSP engine is a cool deal, but by itself it is not J2EE, and doesn't bring with it all the benefits that J2EE brings. Yes, servlets/JSPs are cool, but they are, at heart, part of the presentation layer of an n-tier architecture. If the world needs an enterprise-class solution, with clustering, redundancy, scalability, five 9s, they can't do it with Tomcat, at least by itself. Servlets are cool, yes, but Tomcat as a servlet engine doesn't have what it takes to handle enterprise-level requirements of stability, clustering, etc.
The point that Ganesh was attempting to make was that the OSS community at large needs to wake up from our communal head-in-the-sand attitude about Java and J2EE, and realize that aside from Java there really aren't a whole lot of options for enterprise-level stuff.
(Zope provides one option, but the documentation was horrendous last I looked, and Zope was not easy to configure as an experiment. The "roll yer own, it's all open standards" folks also have a valid point, but businesses seek productivity *gains* by reusing existing, known-good frameworks rather than being forced into productivity *losses* because you have to write your own framework first.)
Web services is really only the communication layer, and really only the automated communication layer -- but that's a very important layer. Yet still, the underlying business-class functionality (in other words, the services a business has to offer the world), is what's important, and Microsoft has done a pretty darn good job with marketspeak and packaging, and has begun selling an end-to-end solution, a solution that promises M$ domination on the back-end to the same degree as on the desktop.
And that is Ganesh's point: we need to either write our own enterprise-level component-based web services soup-to-nuts framework, or we need to unite behind an existing framework (Java, J2EE), or we will wind up suffocating in M$ products all the way around.
Tomcat itself is irrelevant, except as a (vital) component of the existing alternative architecture. And you'll notice that, of the major servlet engine vendors, pretty much all of them now sell J2EE containers that incorporate their prior servlet engine -- Weblogic, Websphere, JRUN... And one notable database vendor (another major part of the enterprise computing framework) has decided to enter the same marketspace with their own offering: Oracle's 9iAS.
You should care because, unless you're the one developing product X, it's possible that it will die for lack of interest. Then you don't even have product X anymore.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
Well COBOL.NET is reportedly very robust.
.Net. You have to remember when Microsoft left the Java market back in '97 their JVM was the fastest available. Some have suspected that was Sun's real reason for pushing MS out, because they were showing 'em up. .Net has been in development since '97 and is remarkably stable today. Much more so than Java in it's first years of release.
But I was trying to focus on the [Everything But Java]/JVM apps, not Java/JVM. If these other languages are seriously being used, seriously supported I'd like to know about it.
I can't say that someone saw a need for each of them, it appears from going through the list that someone had an interest in seeing if it would work. But a good chunk of that list results in 401 errors, so I question the viability.
Sun certainly doesn't support or even encourage it, whereas Microsoft does.
As far as viability of
We'll see.
But again I just wanted to question the reality of this [Everything but Java]/JVM myth.
So what is the problem with Open Source? Well, great software but you need IT gurus to deploy and maintain it. Apache is a good example of that. With a good administration web front-end, I'd have no problem recommending it to my customers because they could do the administration themselves. At the moment, I tend to recommend iPlanet to have a good compromise between price, ease of use and reliability.
That's where J2EE comes into the picture. It provides you with the best platform you could think of to produce enterprise applications. You get out of the box one of the most comprehensive development APIs ever, developing EJBs or servlets is ridiculously easy and even deploying your application is a non-brainer (compared to the alternatives that is). That's what companies want to see: the promise of a short time to market provided they beef up the hardware a bit to support the architecture. At the end of the day, it's cheaper. And that's why I agree with the conclusion of this article: Open Source and Java/J2EE should be the best of friends, not ennemies. The best architecture I could think of in my job? A pure-Java merge between Apache, Tomcat and JBoss with an InstallShield-like installer and web-based admin GUI. That would be a killer app and I could recommend it to every one of my customers.
-- Another useless sig
I mean seriously, i read /. almost religiously 4-5 times a day, and its just getting redundant to hear fud stories like 'Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web?' or 'Will linux die?' 'is this the end of the GPL' and so so so many questions and doubts.
I'm just getting tired of hearing so many 'experts' predict the end of something and then watch it prosper for years to come..
Face it people, Software and Stock analysts are the same as weathermen, except less dependable.. The wind shifts and they scream "its a hurricane", well i'll be one to stay calm until my shed blows away, then it will be time to worry...
Oh, wonderful, don't expect the mainstream buying your great open source application in a box then, you know. Listening to you is just so encouraging for us stupid people. Of course the latest fashion is that open source is just good and useful for developers as development model. Yeah right. You believe in what you are saying? Poor you. May be some main stream people will teach you a lesson one day.
I mean just make it clear, we, *the movement* don't want to sell to the *mainstream*, because these folks are just too darn idiotic for you guys to deal with. You know what, if I were your client or customer, I would just go next door. May I find another decent open source sales person , who has just enough brain and manners to service people without putting them down.
I have never seen *a movement(tm)* so narcistically self-absorbed into their own greatness than this one. Plain blunt. Your attitude sucks so much that even if your software is the greatest and most transparent, your users might just be too appalled by your little attitude problems. Instead of giving it a try, they end up turning away. They certainly would not have an appetite to pay for your boxed application versions, with which I think some open source companies still hope to make some money to pay some more developers to continue to work on some great open source software.
Just beware, if the open source movement fails, it's just *the movement's* own darn fault. You will loose the mainstream heads over toes, if you go on like this. And you will, in the end, be responsible, if the code and much more will be closed again and more monopolized than ever before.
Heck, take something as simple as printing. We have a Sun Ray server at work with our users spread across two buildings. Out of the box Windows can deal with networked print queues easily enough that users can even stumble through it. Why is it so difficult for UNIX? For example, we have a SUn Ray server here supporting around 50 users spread out across multiple buildings. There is no easy method for users to set a default printer (keeping in mind that some of our users do not know anything about UNIX). I do not think it speaks very well for the UNIX community that such a simple problem is still not resolved.
I also remember looking into using LDAP for user acounts, authentication, etc. for Solaris. Except *maybe* for Solaris 8 the whole process is undocumented and unsuported. Meanwhile, it is now part of the Windows 2000 architecture.
We are seeing steps being taken, such as SUN going with Gnome in the future (though I would have preferred KDE). But it seems like the UNIX community is in reactionary mode.
The innovation Microsoft has done is to take existing things and integrate them. Installers, LDAP, etc. For whatever reason, the UNIX community has not seen or accepted the benefits of taking seperate products/projects and integrating them together to achieve something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Micosoft and Windows are by no means perfect. And adding new functionality like an LDAP database does increase complexity. Yet it seems that Microsoft is at at least moving forward while UNIX/Linux seems stuck in the same old hack a solution together mentality.
-- Argel
I won't tell you that, but I will tell you that in my experience their flaws are less shocking. Less guesswork in figuring out what the software "wants."
Maybe so, but these are not revolutionary advances, nor are they unique to dot-net. State management has been built into Apache for a couple of years now at least. First-run code compilation is essentially what mod_perl does. Et cetera, et cetera. Garbage collection, likewise, was new in the seventies. Many, many languages and tools have supported it on web applications for years now.
I'm not saying dot-net sucks, but I am a little tired of hearing how great and innovative it is. I've observed that some of the great parts of COM aren't innovative, and many of the innovative parts aren't so great. I suspect dot-net will be like that too.
Ten years of programming Windows applications and adminning networks with lots of Windows PCs tells me that Microsoft's new "technologies" are always, always much cooler in theory than in practice.
I don't doubt your results at all, and if you're happy with the degree of gratuitous non-orthogonality you've encountered so far, super. My experience with COM (and the whole Windows API, actually) is that stuff works in subtly, frustratingly different ways from what is promised in the documentation. And to beat my previous point to death, it's almost always the most "exciting" features you see in demos and books that have the most severe limitations.
Why just one direction? Surely the Open Source members outnumber a little Redmond company (in more ways than one). FWIW, Open Source gave the end-user the freedom to choose - so if its a choice between J2EE and .net, surely _both_ is an appropriate choice?
I do like a lot of things in J2EE, I like quite a number of things with .net. I think there's room in the Open Source enviroment for both.
Microsoft's webservices are XML over HTTP. Java webservices are for all I can tell RMI. There is only lip service paid to the uddi standard. Sun is pushing it's own vision of the future. Anyway the point is that if SOAP and UDDI are what wins Microsoft and IBM will own that market. MS more than likely taking the lower - medium end,IBM taking the upper market and I image linux taking the very low end. More than likely what we see today but with Java losing market share rather than gaining it.
The beauty of WebServices, at least in the .NET model, is that they use
strictly W3 specifications to communicate, UDDI for discovery, WSDL for service
description (kind of like XML IDL,) SOAP for RPC, and XML for data transfer. If
anything Apache should be capable of becoming an excellent performer in the
WebService market. The only question is how. IIS with ASP.NET makes WebServices
insanely simple, as the following code generates a fully functional webservice:
<%@ WebService Language="VB" Class="MyMathLib" %>
Public Class MyMathLib
<WebMethod(Description:="Add two numbers.")> _
Public Function Add(ByVal X As Integer, ByVal Y As Integer) As Integer
Return (X + Y)
End Function
End Class
When IIS compiles this (fully compiled and cached as a native image, not scripted nor interpretted,) it generates all necessary information to execute it, a WSDL file to describe it's use (to automatically build SOAP proxies,) and IIS also will provide a default webpage to test it's functionality, complete with SOAP, HTTP POST, and HTTP GET examples of how to call the WebService.
If anything, Apache might get hurt if WebServices become very popular if they don't have a simple method to build them like ASP.NET will have. But Apache can and always will be a player given the only information you need to build a functional WebService lies at W3.
As a open source advocate and history buff..open source will lose the battle. Not because out of quality or innvovations that it brings but sheer number of stupity that it brings. It assumes that to heavy on the notion that business will open their software to help each other out. Right.... It makes the assumption that some will open their code so other will to0..Right...... The truth of moment is we live in a capalistic society, were competiviness is the very nature of the beast. IE Apple showing its windows environment to bill gates in the early 80's. Microsoft helping Mono. And the final icing on the cake the russian programmer who felt it necessary to jeopardize Adobe secerts. Companies will take advantage of protecting their secerts. Especially in a possible "recessionary" economy. Open Source appoarch is too academic, it will fail because it not take economics and capatial nature of all things..
Ok. So Joe User points his browser at a web server. What new features does this webserver need in order to return "Content-type: text/html" and "<b>hello Joe User<b>? Besides, I hardly call buffer overflows a 'feature'.
What would a user rather have -- a free server that does plain webserving, or a moderately priced one that does webserving plus e-commerce?
Uh oh. I better tell my customers we haven't been doing e-commerce, we must have faked it!
PAY ATTENTION: (spoiler):
Where is the PHP enterprise component architecture? What about clustering and failover? Where are the WSDL and UDDI implementations? Don't show me bits and pieces here and there. Show me a framework. Show me a reference implementation. Show me a friendly interface.
This persons whole argument is based around the fact that Apache, Perl, Modules, whatever, aren't in a pretty 'point and click' package. I hardly see that as a sign of 'Losing the Battle'. Come to think of it, I thought we were suppose to have already lost the battle because of the overwhelming number of choices for window management.
What version of SQL Server is shutting down on you?
7. It doesn't shut down constantly, but it's more like the darned thing can't get more than a 2 or 3-week uptime if its life depended on it (well - I guess its life DOES depend on it now, doesn't it?)
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
there is no microsoft. only zeul
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
>> and more to do with managed code (like EJB's). Internally for my Fortune 1000 corporation, I can share the "login authentication code" amongs 10 seperate applications without the applications needing the compiled Servlet or DLL on the machine itself. <<
Sounds like a good use for scripting technology.
>> I've seen a lot of PHP, ASP/COM, and Cold Fusion code that could have been so much easier to maintain if they would have stuck some of the core logic into a "distributed object model" of some sort. <<
What is wrong with "distributed modules"? Why @#!* OO crap? (www.oop.ismad.com)
>> It's really all about the bigger picture. Sure, some little site that uses a couple of include files and global variables can be managed fine by PHP, but it's all about scalability in terms of the applications power and complexity. <<
Try using tables to manage large applications instead of RAM variables.
ANYHOW
I think the stateless launch-and-release web server model will evetually be replaced with a more minicomputer session-like model anyhow.
It just gets simpler to keep everything in place until the user is gone (or times out) rather than launch-and-release over and over again. Caching will take care of the less-used problem.
Then building web apps will resemble client-server development.
Table-ized A.I.
I did say *unoptimized -- I know that a properly coded and optimized application written in in C++ can easily outperform a properly coded and optimized Java application. My point was that Java is *fast enough* ... given that no one has time in their development schedule to completely optimize anything, and no one has enough competent programmers to code it that way, even if they had enough time to do it and money to pay them.
Oh, and typical server applications?!? If you're writing server applications using a one thread-per-server-scheme, you are nowhere, and you are if you're writing java, cuz it doesn't know from multiplexing, at least in 1.3.Ah ... you're talking about using select() to code I/O handlers. I begin to see the problem -- you seem to think that a web server is a typical server application. I suppose I should have been more specific; I was referring to business applications -- ERP, DSS, HR, A/R, A/P, Inventory Management, etc -- the type of applications that businesses pay money to have developed, because they need them to run their businesses. These sorts of applications are rarely I/O bound, because they typically have no more than hundreds of users and spend most of their time waiting on database queries and user input. With this sort of application, the use of multiple threads to manage code execution is perfectly sensible, and results in very clean and easy to maintain code. You'll note that I was not advocating writing webservers or databases in Java -- but backend applications that serve webservers and use databases are excellent targets for Java development.
Bash c#,Go back and read what I wrote -- I didn't claim that Java was as fast as C++ for *everything* -- just the sorts of applications I develop: business applications. Of course, if you continue to think of Java (and the JVM) as strictly an interpreted language, you're not keeping up with what the JIT compilers are doing these days, and you're completely ignoring the native-code compilers for Java.
Sorry for spelling: late, drunk.Friends don't let friends post drunk.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
MS bashing aside, .NET is a really great idea from a developer's standpoint, and its implementation is great.
/. vibe, but come on... This is New for Nerds, not News for Platform-Exclusive People. PHP, Perl, Java, they all have their uses--why can't people accept that, maybe, MS actually makes good products once and a while? :-)
I'm a web developer, so it's my job to stay up on the newest technologies. I recently picked up "Professional ASP.NET" by Wrox, and, about 650 pages in, I have come to the conclusion that ASP.NET is one of the most fuctional, flexible web platform I have ever seen.
Sure, PHP is just dandy... But ASP.NET adds on so much functionality, it's scary. Sure, that may be one of the reasons to shun it from a certain viewpoint--letting a MS platform have so much control--but as a developer, ASP.NET is a dream come true.
I know this goes against the general
What's a sig?
Same situation here and I am wondering the same thing.
maru
And we all know what happens when the beams cross.
Wait, I'm confused.
Do you mean total plutonic reversal? Or do you mean Zeul (minion of Gozer) is confined to the 7th plane of hell and Dana and Lewis are turned back into people?
-Peter
In the +1yr I've developed with PostgreSQL i've had no big problems with it. I'm a former Oracle specialist, but it was a smart move for me to switch to Postgres.
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
hey that's a fact.
I'm not affraid of that, it ain't going to work straight.
give me all your garmonbozia
An we all know how well the E-Commerce sites are doing!
The average web user doen't want or need this stuff, they just want information (or entertainment). HTML, .JPG ...
Web services will have a place - in B2B and other closed environments (and VPNs). But does open source really want to go down this road? Where's the fun in B2B?
-- Welcome to nowhere fast / nothing here ever lasts.
Agreed but given two competent sys admins who know their platform, the Linux one will be able to do more for you, quicker.
The main reason is the wealth of tools available he can work in that simply won't hurt the rest of the system. How many NT admins would worry about installing ActiveState Perl "just in case it made things unstable"? More than those who'd "apt-get install python" on Debian, that's for sure.
It will always take a good admin to keep a server up but at the end of the day, all the good NT admin's I've ever met who learned a similar level of Linux seem pretty happy with Linux over NT.
There are, of course, thousands of people who claim to be sys admins who have the single "skill" of working it out from a gui tool. Ask these people to move 500 users accounts or 300 virtual hosts from one machine to another and they are as useful as chocolate firemen.
I don't see any indication at the moment that the number of Servlet/JSP/J2EE sites is dropping in favour of ASP or .NET
i don't know that'd we'd ever see this. those sites that are using j2ee (or perl, php, or python, for that matter) are using that solution because it's _not microsoft_. imho, it may easier to create a m$ web services solution, but i don't think you'll have the same flexibility and performance.
it's also important to keep in mind that the apache percentages can be misleading. several j2ee containers (some may not even be open source) have their own web servers. so, even though apache loses a bit of market share, m$ doesn't gain any.
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
Having to decide what route to take for our company, I have followed the discussion with great interest. Our company uses IIS and Cold Fusion, and we are hitting the wall, because Cold Fusion lacks many features of a real programming language. Our company has quite some backoffice processes that our now done mainly using CF, which is obviously not the right tool for this.
.NET is the final aspect. Having a small IT dep, we are trying very hard to limit the number of languages and different systems as much as we can. C-sharp can be used for any task under NT, from web page programming up to handling backoffice logic, and writing DLLs, etc. etc. This might also be true for Java, but C# is simply a newer, cleaner and better instance of java. The philosophy behind .NET is also very appealing. Being able to generate browser specific code seamlessly, being able to design web applications as if it were regular applications which happen to have a web-frontend, being able to use all the features of the latest Explorers which are now predominant, while automatically being compatible with other browsers are huge benefits. Sure, there will be tools that can do this or parts of this for java based solutions as well. But the advantage of .NET is that it is one complete, integrated solution, having heavyweight MS behind it.
.NET is ofcourse that we are tying ourselfs into NT for a long time to come. But you can argue about exactly how bad that is, when you consider the alternatives. I expect that many companies will jump the .NET bandwagon, which creates a power strong enough to avoid a stranglehold of any kind by MS.
.NET and stay with NT. Our IT dep is small. Small means lower costs. We need solutions that are easy to maintain and yet powerful. We need to be able to develop quickly. We want to keep the number of different components and languages to a minimum. DotNET simply fits the bill.
So I've looked into open source solutions, with Linux + Apache + PHP (frontend)/Java (backend) as the most promising solution. On top of stability and speed of the Linux/Apache combo, PHP gets you the development speed needed to set up webpages, and Java would get us a full blown programming language for the business logic.
However, I quickly found out that this route is not realistic. We are a small company, we do not have a big IT department. To run the Linux alternative right, a lot of expertise is needed, much more than running an NT platform. Setting up Apache + SSL + PHP + Java is already a much more complicated and time consuming exercise than setting up NT + CF + Java. Maintaining it adequatly requires deep knowledge and lots of experience with Unix. Not to mention keeping track of all the little hacks here and there, the tricks that can be so conveniently implemented since everything is open source and flexible, but which create a maintenance nightmare. To get and keep this kind of knowledge inside the company and redundantly is difficult when you want to have a small IT dep. Granted, you get much more flexibility. But at big price. Granted, you get more speed and stability, but this can also be achieved using different means such as a simple load balancer. Hardware wise we have to be redundant already anyway.
Add to this that NT is narrowing the gap in terms of speed and stability with Linux anyway. Unless you have very specific needs, IIS is good enough, at least for us it is.
The coming of
The disadvantage of
So our conclusion is to go with
My karma ran over your dogma
Yes I am using Zope but MS have just released SharePoint. OK, it costs £2000 minimum but a portal can be set up in a snap. On Zope CMF you have to hack DTML pages just to change the backround colour.
In the team I am involvled in I am the only one who has time to get into this. Everyone else will push for an MS solution due to ease of use. Sad.
I would have a really hard time believing this story if I hadn't gone through something very similar. I think it comes down to this: If the PHBs has someone technologically adept around, they will exploit that person to the point where that person quits. Then, the PHBs will actually do things by themselves, but in the most assinine, mediocre manner. There is a psychological structure here that you need to get out of. By putting machines together from scratch, trying to resurrect a 486, etc, etc... you were showing your PHB that you could be used very effectively. Then, when you quit, the PHB spent your salary on Windows! Talk about adding insult to injury. Well, I wish you the best of luck. I also suggest coding an open source 'web application' while you have free time--it seems this would be a good thing.
The ratio of fact / persuation is too high -- ignore this.
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Location transparency is non-existant. I've not seen a single app that benefits from not knowing whether a service it's using is local or remote. This is bunch of overhyped crap from CORBA. If you do distributed objects you're always forced to cater for network failures so you might just as well have it explicitly stated in the code. Before you jump here, note that I'm not dissing the idea of a naming service or some other directory lookup system I'm just saying that if you're accessing a remote service you might as well be explicit about it. EJB is big, bloated and it's almost never the right approach to take. It's java specific (yes I know about RMI/IIOP but it's more pain than it's worth) it's complicated for its own good and very slow. You've been reading too many press releases from SUNW
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I'm sorry but what you wrote doesn't make any sense. You can't use one "GUI" to do everything, that's like trying to use one form to do everything.
What you seem to be saying is that you will no longer be given the option of not installing and running new software, instead it will install and run itself without asking you, then go and download and install anything else it needs from the internet. Dangerous stuff there... It may be inevitable, but this certainly seems like a recipe for disaster if not done correctly.
Thankfully, with Microsoft at the helm, we're all doomed...
Fanatically anti-fanatical
IIS does not run in a privileged (a.k.a. "kernel-mode") process. It cannot directly read/write addresses in kernel memory. As an IIS developer at Microsoft for the SMTPSVC who actively debugs IIS every day, I know very well that INETINFO.EXE is a user-mode process.
The source of your confusion may be that IIS threads have SYSTEM tokens, granted from the NT SCM which launches INETINFO.EXE. This, however, does not offer any performance boost, nor does it allow access to kernel memory space. As with any user-mode process, any attempt by an IIS thread to read/write kernel memory results in an access violation, regardless of the thread's access token.
The good performance of IIS's W3SVC is due to its asynchronous architecture that allows its threads to avoid blocking on I/O operations. Thus many I/O operations can be pending concurrently without a bloat in the number of threads, avoiding excessive context switching and VM swapping for extra stack space.
D
OS X has a great user interface, I agree, so why does the OS X version of Mozilla not follow the Aqua standards? Because the programmers are too f***ing lazy to tailor their UI to the environment in which people will be using it. </rant> Sorry
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
If I can do:
- web services with a click of the mouse;
- horizontal scaling with the simple addition
of a new computer;
- ease code reuse;
What else will I need ?
Microsoft is not stupid anymore! Now it knows
that the internet is the way to go.
Java is the only answer.
Actually, the languages all use the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure). The CLI was also submitted to ECMA.
Microsoft and other companies shouldn't be allowed to misappropriate the good will that web services have, only to deliver something proprietary.
I normally don't write Micro$oft, but in this case I was trying to get across, "Big, Bad, American company with lots of Money." I tried to use it only in that one context, I believe you'll see I use 's' in other places.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
also, I'm not convinced it's totally reliable when dealing with firewalls.
for example, I asked it to look at my domain. it correctly identified the server I'm running (PersonalNetFinder/1.0, which is the MacOS 9 personal web server) but when it looked at the operating system, it got the firewall's operating system (FreeBSD). this is because I'm running rinetd on a NAT firewall. port 80 is forwarded to the Mac that works as a little mini-server. (someday I'm going to buy a Real Server(tm) and move my web stuff over there. until then, the Mac works fine.)
the fact of the matter is that PersonalNetFinder/1.0 does not, and will never, run on FreeBSD. it's a MacOS-only server (it doesn't even run on OSX as far as I know). so if it was a little brighter, it would know that.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I agree. But here's the thing: we're talking about how Apache just lost marketshare to the pointy-clicky IIS types. So I'm going to make a break from my /. brethren and suggest the following: lower the bar. Don't cater to Only People Who Know What They Are Doing(tm). Find out what tools stupid people need to become competent, and give them that. If stupid people don't like to read and hack .conf files, fine. Build a GUI with mouseover help and wizards that protect them from themselves. Surprisingly, you will find that many people are comfortable admitting that they are stupid and want a product that lets them stay stupid. In fact, while I fully geek-out on computers, I will pay through the teeth to not have to think for one single second about my car. I trust the car to be safe, and if it breaks, I find a shop to fix it and spare me the details. Do the mechanics make fun of me? I don't care. I'll make fun of myself in that regard -- "I'm car-challenged!" But I will not stop driving. Apache is losing market share? People will not stop serving Web pages, even if they're Web-challenged. So we have to fix it and spare the details, or cede that market to MS.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
So you're assuming the male ones have something that can be circumcized?
I have admin'd Apache quite a bit, I have also developed for and admin'd Zope and WebLogic.
Web Services is a viable paradigm. It isn't the only one or the right one for everything. In that it is like everything else, even Apache.
Web Services are a technically sound way of harnesing the power of frameworks and design patterns in the Web environment. They also make a great business sense for commercial software developers of all sizes. Right now they are also sexy and have a momentum. Web Services are already big and are going to get really big, like it or not.
Apache isn't going to die, it's going to be the perfect solution for a whole lot of people for years to come. Just like for a whole lot of people Web Services will be the perfect solution. More money will be changing hands via Web Services, and because of that many people will dismiss Apache (and other traditional Web Servers) as second tier, out-dated and amateurish. Personally, I don't care what people like that think.
I would use Zope (+custom product) to almost everything, because I am most familiar with it. Someone else might well use Apache (+extension module), because that's what they know best. In most cases we both would get the thing done. I would think I am better off, but I would, wouldn't I.
--Flam, who should start working one that +custom product
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
damn my school just purchased this thingy. lucky me as a student I get to help with it.
What's the big issue here? Open Source has all it needs for Web Service. It's the buisness people turning up with this Web Service Idea (note the current eLearning boom) and naturally they implement it in 'doze 'cause they wanna implement it with stuff they and their semi-salesmen/programmers are familiar with. In one year, when the OSS people need money again and join the parade, it's gonna all be OSS again. .NET is in (What a mess! More unorganized and beta than any OSS-Solution could ever be. ROTFL!) and said to him: Listen, I'll do it, but all with Open Source. It'll maybe take longer than Win2K /ASP/VBS, but you'll save 20K Euro and we'll have a Spinoff to sell for money when it's done. He liked that. .NET, Conntent Syndication Systems and Web Service Solution packaging for moneymaking just to collect their next major asskick from OSS in 12 months the latest. Stay calm, we've got all the time in the world. That's why our code is so good. Haven't you noticed that OSS is later but better most of the time??? KDE/GNOME make sence for a year now - 'doze has been there for a long time. And now it's gonna wither and die. Billyboy has revenues to gather, or he'll go belly up. We write best code or we can't sleep well. That's two completely different things.
I'm working for a guy who said to me: "Make an eLearning Framework. Now." I checked the Mickeysoft prices, the current true state
The Dark Side is going all
All I'm saying here is: Let them hopp around, make a big stink and get tired - but don't let that irritate you.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
and are afraid to have to learn...
The choice now is simple 1) SQL Server 2000 / IIS 5.0 + .Net or 2) Oracle 9I and J2EE.
Actually, a significant number of enterprises are using Oracle + COM/IIS. That happens to be my speciality, and I can tell you that there is no dearth of work.
What version of SQL Server is shutting down on you? I'm curious because one of my clients is using SQL Server 6.5, which is actually pretty stable. They want to upgrade to SQL Server 2000, which makes me a little nervous...
And with forte/netbeans for Java (or IBM Visual Age, for that matter), I can write one in two. Click, drag, click, drag, click-click, click-click, done. And Java WORKS FINE ON LINUX, DAMNIT.
.NET will do one day in the future. .NET is a blatant Java ripoff, and the sad thing is that people are so stupid, they'll probably fall for it...
J2EE and Java tools did last year what MS are saying
OSS has yet to produce something that competes with the complexity and webservices potential like .net and the like.
Heck, even for people using java on the backend (which is where java seems to be finding itself more and more these days) windows the choice because java simply runs better on windows than linux.
-
I would like to see the netcraft study after all of the unintentional IIS sites are shut down because of CodeRed.
Unfortunately Netcraft doesn't usually scan unintentional sites. Somebody has to do a query first, and then Netcraft will start scanning.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
When are we going to see the equivalent of Delphi or object VB + DirectX IDE on Linux?
Do you know what kylix is?
DirectX IDE? What?
You're not mismatching direct-X with active-X are you? Active-X is what VB supports, and allows programs to interact with each other. Direct-X is the direct media layer which games use.
For 2D direct-X linux has a nice equivalent: SDL. Simple Directmedia Layer.
From my own expireience far easier to use than direct-X.
For 3D I'm not on the run.
If you actually meant Active-X, then KDE has a cute equivalent.
If only AmigaOS had been released for Intel back when Windows still sucked big time...
If only some early *nux version would have been stackable with DOS as windows 3.0 did, we would all use it today, and this is no joke. Really. Microsoft promised us (IBM) since MSDOS 1.0 to make an unix like derivate for the pc, are promise never hold. If an Msdos compatible *nix kernel (one that could run all existing dos programms) would have been broadly aviable at times when windows 3.0 just marketet we would have all switched to it.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
The pleasure in the GUI is CLI??? This is very funny. VERRY FUNNY.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
I did say *unoptimized -- I know that a properly coded and optimized application written in in C++ can easily outperform a properly coded and optimized Java application. My point was that Java is *fast enough* ... given that no one has time in their development schedule to completely optimize anything, and no one has enough competent programmers to code it that way, even if they had enough time to do it and money to pay them.
Actually, you said 'an expert can still hand-optimize C++ to out perform Java', a position you're softening, but that's not even really the issue. The design of a C++ program can be such that unoptimized code almost necessarily runs faster than is possible with Java. Just look at using typesafe STL algorithms versus looping over java.util.Iterator and downcasting. Or using templates to effect compile time subclassing. BTW sorry I called your reasoning a load of crap. that was gratuitous.
Oh, and typical server applications?!? If you're writing server applications using a one thread-per-server-scheme, you are nowhere, and you are if you're writing java, cuz it doesn't know from multiplexing, at least in 1.3.
Ah ... you're talking about using select() to code I/O handlers. I begin to see the problem -- you seem to think that a web server is a typical server application. I suppose I should have been more specific; I was referring to business applications -- ERP, DSS, HR, A/R, A/P, Inventory Management, etc -- the type of applications that businesses pay money to have developed, because they need them to run their businesses. These sorts of applications are rarely I/O bound, because they typically have no more than hundreds of users and spend most of their time waiting on database queries and user input. With this sort of application, the use of multiple threads to manage code execution is perfectly sensible, and results in very clean and easy to maintain code. You'll note that I was not advocating writing webservers or databases in Java -- but backend applications that serve webservers and use databases are excellent targets for Java development.
Fair enough, I don't know what type of code you are writing. And if Java serves your needs than use it; I use it myself because it is frequently the best tool. And FWIW, I was thinking more along the lines of /dev/poll or kqueue() than select()
Bash c#,
Go back and read what I wrote -- I didn't claim that Java was as fast as C++ for *everything* -- just the sorts of applications I develop: business applications. Of course, if you continue to think of Java (and the JVM) as strictly an interpreted language, you're not keeping up with what the JIT compilers are doing these days, and you're completely ignoring the native-code compilers for Java.
Well, you said 'typical server applications' and you naturally think that means the kind you write, while I think it means the kind I write. I defer to you in determining what best suits your needs. I just get tired of people suggesting the JIT compilers or even native code producing Java compilers render C++, my personal fave, obsolete. Mostly just boosterism on my part.
Sorry for spelling: late, drunk.
Friends don't let friends post drunk.
The posting I can deal with. I just wish my friends would adopt some sort of stance on fat chicks.
I doubt the rising IIS numbers are because of switches from *nix to Win, but rather from existing Win desktop apps being ported to the web.
A bunch of my clients are doing things like trying to get existing desktop apps (VB, MS Access, etc.) to run on remote users' laptops over vpn or ras and are discovering that it is a whole lot easier to just create a web app. Got a vb app and need to make it into a web app? ASP is the quick and dirty solution since much of the code is reusable.
Sure, they could pay me to implement in [insert non-MS technology here], but it would cost the client more, and, if the client is anything like mine, their IS department has to deal with IIS flakiness anyway.
Sorry, dude, but a "Dot com", meaning an Internet web site with a few thousand visitors a day that sells stull if not considered "enterprise class". If you're building a REAL web application for a large enterprise that say, managers their HR, purchasing, etc., then you DO need and you do use the current systems. CGI+Perl may be nice for Dot-Coms, but remember that Dot-Coms are considered small potatoes when compared to a real "enterprise-class" web app.
Ironic that 99% of linux is GNU software. Software that has never been interested in surveys or graphs or marketshare or domination, but merely to give some freedom back to the users that the corporations took away.
I have yet to really figure out what all the hoopla is about. I run vanilla Apache, which then runs a persistent Perl process. We do e-commerce through an international reseller market, have web sites for our resellers to enter prices and shipping charges, and maintain our own through our main database. I have yet to see what _any_ of these technologies offers. What does Java offer that I'm not already doing easily and well? What does .NET offer? How does a "web service" differ from a well-documented CGI interface, perhaps using XML as the transfer language?
As a web developer, this really baffles me. If anyone can shed any light on the actual advantages of this, please comment or email me at johnnyb@wolfram.com.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Indeed. Our evangelist friend appears to be on the Java Mafia's copious supply of marketing crack.
People, kindly take a few minutes to browse through the LinuxToday talkbacks on that article, and watch Ganesh's claims being dismembered from a multitude of perspective -- including those of quite a number of professional Java developers. You'll see his essay mocked for playing dumb games with Netcraft statistics, zinged for pushing the licensing issue under the carpet, derided for trying to urge a bloated, inappropriate, sweeping solution to a basically non-existent problem, and outright flamed for trying to hustle us with the threat of Micorsoft's vapourous marketing initiative du jour.
And, as the hucksters say, much, much more.
(And, people: Kindly tell me that you're not dumb enough to get stampeded by this blatant con job. Please.)
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
The question is, will anyone care about web services. I'm not about to pay for these so called services if I have to wait long periods to download the software, wait for the software to talk to whoever is supposed to be running it for me, and then get disconnected while using these services. Like most Americans who have internet access today, I'm still on a POTS connection. Web services simply won't work for home users until we have ubiquitous broadband that's easy, and reliable.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Wish I could, but I'm fresh out of mod points.
I use Zope a lot. Doing a webhosting kind of a thingy at a ISP. A collaborative environment at a university. A online game by myself. That last is of course a hobbyist project, but the other two are "enterprise-level".
I am very much into the web services paradigm (seen it called at least "application server" and "web application platform") and have looked into a number of different implementations. Zope compares really well. It's unproven at highest levels of scalability (the Megaportal class), but also is the most flexible and has the best user management I have seen.
Don't despair about J2EE or
(A few quotes from earlier replies.)
"I admit Zope is cool. But mention it to your average pointy-hair, and they'll look at you cross-eyed. Java and J2EE they've at least heard of - maybe they don't really understand it - but they've heard of it."
"I perfectly agree. I don't know how come Zope has never taken off. Zope and Python are sweet
"Zope is cool. Python is cool. But neither have the marketing budget of IIS and ASP."
Don't be the defeatist! Remember the time not so long ago when somebody would the same thing, except it was about Linux or Apache. So you might get the same funny stares and sighs you did the last time, but you probably already have their ear. After all, you were right the last time.
A point to stress in the excellent list above: Zope is useful out-of-box and, while extensive development is going on, the core of Zope is a mature product.
--Flam, an admited Zopista
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Sure you can code your own transaction handling code in servlets but IMHO you're not splitting up your application properly if you're doing that.
That is purely a function of the app server. There is nothing stopping someone from implementing stateful session beans that are load balanced. its just a hell of a lot harder to do. AFAIK Gemstone/J supports load balanced stateful session beans. Of course they do....they're all part of the J2EE spec. If you want the certification you have to include everything. I simply dont agree. I dont think that having to do error handling implies that I should have to do everything. All apps would benefit from not knowing if a service is remote or local. I cant imagine an enterprise-level app that wouldnt benefit from that. OK. The first sentence is pretty ridiculous. Of course its Java specific. Thats what its called EJB. I dont read press releases btw. Could care less about the marketing crap.My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
My original (sarcastic) remark stands. It would be impossible to upgrade from NT 4 to 2000 without rebooting, and 2000 has been out much less than 4 yrs, therefore you have not had your computer online nonstop.
Long live apache :)
Yeah, no doubt. Apache go somewhere? Blah.
How long has Apache 2.0 been out? I really don't know, but it's been a while, I think. Apache is so good, it still seems everybody is only using 1.3...
IIS - Install patches daily.
Apache - Install and forget about it.
As a newbie sysadmin in a 50/50 UNIX/NT office I quickly noticed that I was learning lots more Microsoft than UNIX. Microsoft servers can simply handle less stuff and they break a lot more than the UNIX ones (and when they break the reasons are usually more inexplicable and require longer, deeper investigations, and yield weirder, shakier fixes..."I dunno, I was just checking stuff and unchecking it and looking around and it started working again...") - and the best way to learn how things work is to participate in fixing them when they break and configuring them when you need another (IMHO). We had a FreeBSD server (used for (ISP) authentication) crash the other day - the thing had an uptime of over 18 months and I didn't even know its name or where to find it (I never needed to - it always just worked, and I was always too busy trying to figure out why computer D can't see computer H when every other machine on our [Microsoft] internal network can see them both). Conversely with Microsoft releasing security patches for NT4 and 2000 sometimes twice a day, it took one wave of open exploits for me to know every NT server we had, what is on it, how well it's been maintained, whether its backed-up, and who gets pissed when things on it break. I don't know how well other people are doing with NT/IIS vs. Apache/Linux/UNIX, but 30 days without something on NT or 2000 crashing is considered miraculous in our office. Anyway, knowing that we had long ago used UNIX and (probably) Apache for our web servers out, of total frustration with some stupid nonsensical NT problem that wasted a day and had some dumb utterly undocumented fix or other - I asked one of the senior web developer why in the heck we weren't using FreeBSD to handle web serving - since we use it for everything else important (mail, nntp, dns, etc...). His answer was (quoted as best I can remember), "UNIX sysadmins are harder to find and way more expensive than NT ones. We made a business decision to move to the Microsoft platform because it is 'good enough' and because we can get people to administer it cheaper, and faster. If you get hit by a truck, we can have someone else doing your job in a week, if [insert our senior UNIX administrator's name here] gets hit by a truck, don't come back - we're closed." I asked our senior UNIX administrator why we weren't using Apache/FreeBSD and he said "Because I got busy there for awhile and didn't feel like messing with it anymore" It was then that I noticed how puny my econo-car looks next to our senior UNIX administrator's brand new luxury mobile (with thermometers placed all through the cabin so that the air-conditioning can maintain a precise 72 degrees in all seasons). (And it was then that I stopped checking out slashdot once in a while, and started reading it religiously - I have to figure out some way to advance in my Linux/UNIX knowledge without ever having to build new systems or fix broken ones.)
Yeah, explains that sudden increase in MLA licenses - doesn't it? Excuse me, but I've got to finish riping out my NT boxes with NetWare 5.1!
The fact that you're talking about 'the Killer App of a website' makes me think you've never done web development for a large corporate customer. Large corporations don't think of their business as a 'website'. It's their enterprise, their whole business. It's spanning a handful or a dozen business units, with various platforms, languages, and systems. EJB's aren't 'neat', they're critical whe you're pushing information around to several hundred people across a campus of a dozen buildings in several cities. The 'website' is one end of a big beast, the pretty end. Web services are the rest of it. And Apache doesn't touch any of it.
- Sig this!
drop a class into c:\winnt\java\trustlib and instantiate it with GetObject("java:classname")
not that this is as fast as a well coded COM object, but it's just another one of those flexibility things.
Here's some more reasons why people like IIS. IIS is *free*. all you need to buy is the OS, which comes pre-installed for most people. PHP runs over IIS. JSP runs over IIS. ColdFusion runs over IIS. You can slap Perl on it. And guess what? they're pretty much configuration-free on IIS. ASP is picked up quickly by novice coders because they can grab PWS from their windoze 98 CD (or IIS from their win2k CD) and start coding away in VBScript with no tedious configuration tweaks. VBScript is simple(simplistic, actually). there are thousands of tutorial sites on the web (PHP is a little more thin on the ground, I think). This means there are a lot of people who can code ASP. ASP Coders are a cheaper commodity than OS devs. Clients like cheap, and clients like pretty.
Yes, a well-coded PHP app will always be faster than a poorly coded ASP app (which most are, I'm afraid to say), but the customer can't tell the difference. I could convince a potential client that I can write better code than a competitor, that it'll run faster, it'll be more secure, blah blah blah, but the client will go and chase the pretty butterflies of an eye-candy front-end, or take the cheap option from the Microsft house down the road (the one with an entire team of novice programmers). They don't know there IS a difference under the skin - they only see the outside, and a lot of the time they choose the platform, with or without recomendations from me, meaning they go with what they think is the only OS on the market (can we guess what that's called, children?). Certainly screws the 'informed choice of platform' thing
There's a lot going for IIS, unfortunately. I work with it every day, and our machines are constantly under attack. I'd dearly love to format my drives and slap Linux on with Apache and Resin and PHP and mySQL, but this isn't going to happen. I run Cygwin on my workstation, PHP on both servers, JSP on one. I like OpenSource, but hey! There's only one Operating System, right? Apart from that mcntosh thing, of course.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Microsoft's .net is going to automatically share out this investor information? If not why is this something you couldn't do with apache/mysql/php?
How will this be easier, quicker, and cheaper than using open source? I'm intrested to know what a traditional web server (with a database and xhtml) not handle? You seem to be rambling about something but failed to give any facts. Explain to us exactly how buying NT, MS-SQL, Oracle 9I and J2EE is cheaper than an opensource solution.
Maybe the Microsoft marketing machine has infected the brain of your company but I've done work for plenty it hasn't.
You obviously don't write serious business software...
Don't be a twit. You know nothing about the guy. Grow up.
> The real question is how the Open Source
> community should respond. You can quote me
> on this one, if we simply stand behind
> reliability and laugh at Microsoft's security
> holes and crashes, WE ARE TOAST.
Very well spoken and I agree with your points.
I have been working as a professional unix software dev for over 15 years now.
I love unix and open source, but I feel that, in general, a lot of the open source that is out there is nowhere near prime time.
It has been very frustrating for me, as I think that there are some really smart people working in unix and open source. I think that ego and other stupid not-invented-here (TM) mentalities have REALLY hurt the unix and open source communities in general.
As much as I loathe M$, I have to give them credit for a couple of things:
-consistency of user interface
Yeah, I think skins are cool and everything,
but in the end, most users want a consistent
and useful user interface and could give
a rats ass about the GUI wars that unix has
had forever (one of my major pet peaves).
-more money and effort into producing usable
products.
I'm not trying to defend M$, because they
certainly have more than their fair share
of really evil and stupid bugs, but the
perception on the part of the user is
that of a stable, consistent and
full-featured environment and suite of
software.
-incredible marketing.
Joe User could care less about us thumbing
our noses at M$. They want consistent,
useful and good products.
Some areas that I think unix/linux/open source community requires some major work on:
-consistent user interface
The X guys REALLY dropped the ball here by
saying that they are not specifying a look
and feel.
I think that having a dozen different GUI
toolkits is not only ridiculous, it is
harmful in the end.
If a particular [dominant?] toolkit doesn't
cut the mustard, have a design and revamp
review to get things right rather than
coming up with YAFGT (Yet Another F****ng
GUI Toolkit).
-let's get some good fonts
The standard X font set is pretty bad.
-some good UI designs. I've seen some pretty awful stuff and concepts that seem to go out of their way to make themselves different from what people are used to using. Being different/inconsistent is a BAD idea in UI.
-getting coding standards higher and having better design and code review processes.
There are a lot of newbie programmers out there that contribute a lot of code that is probably not suitable to go into production software...
-It almost seems as though the open source community needs a seasoned and very smart benevolent dictator to say what is ok and what is not.
-better documentation in the unix kernel sources and header sources. Some of it is just awful.
It's not all bad; I've seen lots of wonderful, intuitive and useful tools over the years.
In the end, a lot of the code that is crap will die off anyhow; sometimes it is just a painful ride to get there...
-Ralph
Cool, Zope. I'll take a look at it. Like I said "...as far as I know..."
Does Zope compile, or is it yet another interpreter? Mega-cross platform - probably the biggest example would be that it will run on both Unix-types and Windows? (Not that I'd want to run it on windows)
"as long as they work"
"Work" obviously means "works for your company", and all that implies. People who are in business to do business and not to push their world view and futher justice as they see it have only this as their criteria for choosing software.
The only thing wrong with MS as a market leader is that it doesn't fit your ideology. Learn to live with it, because for all your whining it's not going to go away. I don't know why I bothered - nobody will ever get through to you since your mind is closed.
As for not wanting me as your boss - that's a lucky thing, because I doubt you would be selected, or even interviewed, or even qualified to apply.
Novell is dead. If Novell married OJ Simpson and he found out that Novell was cheating on him, it still couldn't be any deader than it is today.
If I hadn't seen the domain on your email, perhaps I might have thought your comment could make sense. Your opinion is coloured...
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Actually, the Gazlle just has to be faster than the slowest Gazelle.
What am i missing here?
I say, let the games begin.
-An Olympic Koder
I could not agree more with your points as to why MS is successful and why linux/open-source remains fringe. You're diagnosis is accurate, but:
-It almost seems as though the open source community needs a seasoned and very smart benevolent dictator to say what is ok and what is not.
This is exactly what will NEVER happen. This whole "movement" started because hackers hate authority, hate being told what to use, and would rather start over a hundred times than help to fix something.
I can't stand it when people say they like diversity in the desktop; they feel that having umpteen desktop environments is beneficial. How the fuck is that remotely true? Everyone's doing they're own thing, re-implementing the news client, the browser, the text editor, etc. Meanwhile, in the centralized command hierarchies of the non-free world (yes, I mean Microsoft), orders are handed down from the top (the top consists of smart people with a goal and a plan) and people spend their work days improving shit, instead of re-inventing because they don't like the leader of so-and-so project, or they don't like the other toolkits, or they'd rather do it in XYZ language.
And why the hell shouldn't centralized hierarchies be more successful? It's how civilization (and it's industries) has operated for centuries. Instead, the "movement" has dozens of toolkits, dozens of desktops, dozens of architectures - one for each ego out there.
For Christ's sake, shouldn't there be a consistent way for an app to, e.g., open a web browser to a certain URL? Sorry, no-can-do. Every app does it differently... sigh. Enough to drive you nuts.
Will we ever have the "benevolant dictator" you speak of? Not while there's ego's to be fed...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I don't think you fully grasped the guys argument. He was arguing that the guy was arguing that though other platforms are capable of doing what's needed, J2EE does it so much better that the alternatives are not really interesting.
Among other things, that goes for performance and code maintanability. J2EE is a truly impressive platform. Trust me. Learn it before you diss it.
Web Services will need to handle huge amounts of traffic when somebody discovers them and develops a liking for them. Performance and scalability are key!
Stop the brainwash
Microsoft always comes back bigger because they BUY with their financial power. I do not watch a lot of TV, but I did notice Microsoft commercials.
I have NEVER seen a *BSD, Linux or Apache commercial! Of course all we out here who are serious like *BSD/Linux+Apache better. Yeah, I run it myself http://www.digitaldaemon.com/, but hey I develop Win32 software to make my living!
So... Since there are so many ~M$ commercials, how come the ~M$ market gains so much??? Just my two cents.
For Winblows XP(ectorate) Customer Service
Just call 1-800-EAT-SHIT
skunk? You mean sco?
No, if he meant SCO; he probably would have said "skank", not "skunk".
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
The Apache foundation is not only Apache httpd, it's got lots of tools which are prepared for the "web of services":
So what if Apache is just a webserver? We can still use Tomcat!
It's just a BloJJ
Did anyone see Code Red attatched to the Apache Server??? The next three months should show if Corp. America has too much money to throw down the IIS hole. (Looking over the horizon for cross platform IIS... nope another mirage) IIS has nothing to offer, I'm biased (and right).
I pretty much live and breathe the technologies that make up the so-called Web services movement. I even co-author a column on WS on IBM developerWorks. Yet, I don't mind saying that in all likelihood, Web services will turn out to be but a round joke.
.NET (and the Web services technologies of many other vendors), it is merely than a more bloated DCOM than DCOM; a more obtuse CORBA than CORBA. The idea of implementing high-transaction RPC over HTTP, using XML in the payload and adopting a protocol without standard primitives for sequencing, transactions, security, etc., is so ridiculous that I can only attribute its current credit to the same pundits who declared that Java applets would take over the world.
To the extent that SOAP is a rich messaging protocol, and operates where EDI, MQ, JMS and the like used to, it will probably do very well because of the flexibility and interop XML gives it.
But to the extent that it turns into the sort of rot that makes up
Web services based on RPC primitives have no techical fundamentals despite the media furore, and it will soon be proved that even within the sphere of Microsoft technologies, WS implementations will not be able to achieve the interoperability and scalability required to become a serious presence on the Internet. The funny thing is that one of the artefacts of the slightly more open Microsoft these days is that you can go to any XML/Web services conference and hear Microsoft reps openly admit these difficulties.
There must be much chuckling in Redmond. They say "boo: Web services" and all their arch-nemesis open-source weenies come down with acute anxiety disorder.
Do relax. XML is the future of the Internet, and open-source rules XML. Web services haven't even *begun* to prove themselves. Go to www.xmethods.com or www.salcentral.com and show me the Web services that will supposedly take over the world. Then lie back, breathe a sigh of release, and put in some contribution to your favorite open-source project in warm gratitude.
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross" -- E.P.
managed to ping the NT servers while they were up, that's why the increase of 2,000,000 servers, it's not that they increased, they just weren't up any of the other months when netcraft did the survey.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Amen, brother. How many times have we seen "architects" screwing up a design by trying to introduce cool features they'd learned about in a seminar or a book? Using XML caching and five way transforms applying n-layers of "logic" where a single fucking stored procedure with proper database permissions would have introduced 100% performance gains and slashed days off of the constantly pushed back deadline. Creating components without proper planning and then pushing them onto dev teams under the false pretense of process and security standardization, components that push back the *every fucking time* you have to use them. Components used *once* with minor modifications for every other use.
:(
Fuck, don't even get me started on over-engineered, twenty-four server hell. I don't feel like calling in sick today.
All MS GUI's SUCK
Maybe it would be possible to make a good GUI?
I have found that Webmin provides a GUI for Apache. But have never tried using it.
He was saying that it was a sign of what was to come, and proceeded to explain why that was so.
If you don't think M$ will be able to pull this off, your opinion of their marketing department needs to be re-evaluated. Unfortunately, everything he said was spot-on. It all could happen this way.
Anyway, when the answer is so obvious, so easy and so ready-made, why fight it? Why not hedge your bets? If, in 5 years, Apache is still king and web services go the way of interactive TV, great. If not, hey: good thing we diversified.
Rot-13 my address to e-mail me.
"So I hurry back to little earth / For another life another birth"
Trust me, anybody doing anything interesting with Java on the server isn't going to want to use Microsoft's JVM to power their solution. MS's JVM kicked everyone else's ass back in the day, but it hasn't been updated with any of the newer Java technologies. Even if they did want to use Microsoft's JVM — and believe me, they won't — they'd know that they can still download it from Microsoft. If they're worried about the clients not having JVMs, they'd still be better off having the clients use more modern JVMs.
The whole Java on XP thing is just a way for Microsoft to tweak Sun by giving them exactly what they asked for (removing their "bastardized" Java from Windows) while taking away even more from Java's "buzz." Even though Java's turned into a flop both for standalone client apps (erm, where are they?) and now for web applets (in favor of Flash), Java still had a little buzz going on with the people who were familiar with it from web applets. Once this is gone, which Sun fears and Microsoft knows they fear it, Java will be "just another" server technology. Sure, it'll get a lot of use, but so do CORBA, DCOM, and TP monitors, and when's the last time anybody got excited over the latter three?
....in everyone's head. Yes, folks, IIS is easy enough for proles to use, and yes, most of them couldn't care less about the holes. Yes, ASP.NET is aimed at tying Microsoft's stuff together into a great big gelatinous mass that will ooze all over the enterprise. Yes, there is a lack of focus in many OS products. Yes, a small drop in Apache usage IS significant, and YES, the corporate world loves Microsoft.
I'd dearly love to use PHP everywhere, and I'd dearly love to use mySQL, Resin, J2EE, JSP, whatever, but I have to eat - the people who pay my wages love Microsoft. Find a way to make them love the alternatives, and Bingo! I'll be able to use PHP more than twice a year.
Get Drunk In Sydney
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
And, why is a GUI necessary for configuration of a web server. It's already (finally) becoming clear that server administrators need to know how to do more than just aim their mouse and click. Insufficient security training is being acknowledged as a business liability.
I hate to break it to you, but a GUI has very little to do with security training. The fact that most of the replies to this thread can't even see that is quite scary.
It's a little more complex than that. The web services MS and Sun are talking about are more interactive, which is why they have Java and C#. We won't know until afterwords, but I'm certain Microsoft is turning Windows from a computer operating system into a "network" operating system. Your applications will move with you, and to which ever device you are using at the time (hence the need for portable bytecode executables). Your computer will ultimately blend into the network. Think of your computer now as a thin client which accesses Microsoft's mainframe. They are taking the model of pay-per-use computing world-wide. Scary times indeed.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
and forget the web too!
The open source community should look ahead of Microsoft and plan for an 64-bit distributed operating system covering LAN/WAN networks under the same APIs.
This O/S will provide networking not in the sense we know it today(login onto network) but in the sense that every computer in the network will be part of a virtual computer spreading across Earth!
Then "web services" will be merely reduced to a few API calls, since networking will be built-in.
I mean that the architecture of the O/S will be the network.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can we distance ourselfs from writing "micro$oft", it sounds unprofesional, and gives in the sight of outsiders, that the OpenSource movement is against economy at all, at commonistic, which of course is not the case. The GPL is itself not against $.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Now I know why Windows installs IIS by default! They want higher Netcraft-ratings! ;-)
I doubt, therefore I may be.
That's what I would like to know. Why is the OSI or whatever a bunch of Microsoft followers, bowing down to their leader? What ever happened to the "scratch-an-itch" angle? If the "open source community" has no need for web services, then what difference does it make? Let Microsoft make their web services and sell them to big corporations. I say good luck to them, but I really don't give a shit.
You are a jackass!
Amongst all this talk of the importance of "web services", I wonder where the real value to the user comes in. My question is: what's the Killer App of a website that goes beyond Apache+PHP? I haven't seen it, and the only thing that anyone seems to be able to say about it is "login authentication." I've worked with EJB, and they are neat - but I have yet to see what they could offer the end user that standard PHP can't.
This reminds me a lot of the talk I heard going on about ActiveX. This cutting-edge new technology was supposed to revolutionize creating components for viewing on the web or, in fact, in any application. Three years later and high-profile websites like amazon.com, yahoo.com, and google.com are still running on Apache, and a Killer App for ActiveX has yet to emerge.
I'm not saying that this "web services" thing _couldn't_ have a killer app - I'd just like to see it first before I decide that forking over tens of thousands of dollars to Microsoft in order to run my website is a good idea.
The main message of the article is:
...).
Please shift OSS development effort away from Mono/DotGNU and PHP towards open source Java products (jakarta project, jboss, kaffe, sable,
Ok, firstly, a GUI for Apache would supplement the text-based config file, not replace it. So you'd still be able to ignore the config tool and do your own thing.
Secondly, who says such a tool would have to mirror whatever Microsoft has? Is an intuitive interface impossible? Is there no way to make security concerns completely obvious?
Uhhhh.. This is getting OT, but I think this is backwards. The driving force behind the push for ASPs was to reduce the overhead administrative costs that businesses shell out for apps and support. ASP proponents reasoned that the monthly cost of using an ASP would be significantly below the costs of maintaining administrative staff, and businesses would naturally migrate to the cheaper alternative. The technology was developed in response to this.
To reverse this trend, it seems like someone has done the hard work for us - now that all the backdoors are in place someone needs to write an Code Red backdoor Apache installer that migrates all of the IIS settings over and then switches IIS to a different port after starting up Apache.
Python is a much more reasonable language for web applications.
And there's no reason it has to gain massive market share to be relevant. If using Python with (say) Zope is our little secret, isn't that just as good?
Our next major site will definitely be Zope based. PHP? Never heard of it.
However, almost all of the technologies you mentioned (JMS, J2EE, etc.) were designed by a consortium of companies doing work in that space for far longer - like BEA, makers of Tuxedo, helping with JMS (the messaging spec). Thus the API has many years of thought behind what is needed, and the actual implemetations ARE based on code that have been around even longer than Java.
J2EE and related technologies have a good lead, and a powerful range of supporters. It will be inetresting to see how the battle goes, but I agree that's where the fight is (and you seem to as well, from what I could make of your response).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So MS makes a new catch phrase and everybody is supposed to shit their pants? /. aside, is a frickin' lame excuse for one big corporate ad at best. Sometimes ads are cool. I spend hours a day reading ads for stuff I'm interested in like all the other surfers out there, but a browser is not an OS and it never will be.
The web,
If there's enough bandwidth to make web services workable then specific apps will be developed to implement them, but they won't be built around freakin' web browsers.
Notice that the posters clutching their guts over this silliness are mostly in financial services. Yeah, that's where all the real open source heart is at.
The percentage of IIS versus Apache is soon becoming irrelevant. What is important is the percentage of Servlet/JSP versus .NET/ASP sites. Which is kind of hard (impossible) to measure using Netcraft by the way.
One of the most succesful Servlet engines now is Tomcat, which is also open source coming from the Apache Jakarta project. I don't see any indication at the moment that the number of Servlet/JSP/J2EE sites is dropping in favour of ASP or .NET. No reason to worry yet.
You miss the big contradiction in your post. You question why someone would use IIS after something like Code Red happens. Well, if someone cares enough about security for it to be the deciding factor in the OS they choose, then they also know that (1) Microsoft released a patch and a workaround for the security hole long before Code Red existed, and (2) all the Linux distributions have tons of patches for all the security holes in them. So if someone really cared about securing his own boxes, he applied the patches or the workarounds and never had to worry about his machines getting bitten. You act like a security-conscious person would just move to Linux, set up a box and forget it, and conveniently forget about all the holes that have been needed to be patched in the Linux distributions. Doesn't sound like much incentive to switch for anybody who knows what they're doing.
Don't worry in a month or two all the code red victims will switch, apache use will go up 20%, and the media will say Microsoft is having a bad month.
Now tell me how you'd go about comparing the settings on the two to see what's different? It's a god damn pain in the ass. You can't compare the two side by side, and there's a handful of entirely separate panels to check for differences, each with sub-panels. You can just look directly in the metabase. You can use a command line tool to do it, or you can use a program called MetaEdit. It's Q240225 in MS's knowledge base thingy. I had the pleasure of admining an NT box for a while...
/.'ers are a bunch of self-gratiating morons. How many of you idiots using Linux have ACTAULLY admin an IIS web server? You guys pull statistics right out of your ass as if this is proof. IIS has more command line based tools than GUI ones simply because ANYTHING you can do through a GUI you can do through the command line AND there are other utilities which are only available through the command line. If you prefer the UNIX syntax in the command line then get the UNIX Services for Windows 2.0.
Perhaps the reason Apache hasn't changed that much is because it doesn't NEED to.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
The previous poster pretty much made it clear that, yes, his former boss doesn't have a clue how to run a server.
How did he get mod up to (4, Interesting)???
I guess this "advanced" IIS administrator never heard of MDUTIL. Silly guy -- remind me never to hire him!
I'm currently using PHP on Linux, with unixODBC, for most development.
I am sorry, but what you are saying sounds like so much crap. I do not doubt that you believe what you spout, but think about the way you awnsered.
.NYET! No, I can't believe Microsoft bet the barn on such stock.
"Robust infrastructures for moving your business online."
If this is what you and so many marketroids are describing as "Web Services" then ppheewww. No doubt that there are business with highly complicated and immersive business applications and no doubt that J2EE and XML are sometimes usefull tools, but this is highly specialized big business technology not everyday pervasive killer app technology. The complexity and details ivolved in designing such apps require very generalized abstract infrastructures, nothing nearly sexy enough to warrant this huge mega blitz marketing campaign that is
I have to believe that when Microsoft uses the term "Web Services" they are talking about cheesy app interfaces to popular websites all using Passport for there authentication. And this is what we are balking at. PHP, apache, and other opensource apps are plenty powerful enough to build such toys. The only thing these opensource apps lack is the marketing muscle to turn these trivial apps into "The Next Great Thing".
Right now, PHB is in a panic and their site is still down, because NT+IIS really isn't easier then UN*X+Apache , despite what MS says in Pointed Haired Boss Weekly
Oh yes.
When I resigned my job, my former boss, within a week, grew a hardware budget, bought a new machine, bought and installed Windows 2000 Server, went through a week of downtime and finally got IIS and the company's LAN back up.
According to Netcraft, they have yet to break that elusive 7-day uptime barrier. And, I know for a fact that they got hit by Code Red I, because their webserver appeared in my logfile (see sig below, they've been rotated out now).
All this to replace a Pentium 100 Linux box which had been running for 178 days, handling several hundred website hits a day, providing DNS, DHCP, NAT services, and handling about 500 megabytes of AutoCAD attachments in the outgoing mail spool every day. Without a hitch.
Hell, the guy was so tight, he wouldn't let me at least buy a big hard disk to throw into an old 486 we had kicking around so that we could get the rather sensitive data that Sendmail was handling onto another host. But Windows 2000 and IIS were money well spent. [Nelson: "Ha-ha."]
The ISP goes down, the Linux machine's nameserver can't find the top-level servers, and everyone gets Server Not Found errors from Internet Exploiter. His solution? Windows reflex: Reboot the Linux machine. I had to physically remove the power and reset switches so that he wouldn't fsck up the filesystem.
He tried to log in because he'd decided he had to administer it, too. From the depths of nearly 20 years of DOS/Windows experience but absolutely no other operating systems whatsoever, he came to me shouting that the machine had a virus, because typing "SCANDISK C:" gave him back an error message with the ominous word "bash".
I calmly told him that the machine didn't even have a C: drive, and referred him back to the Linux book I'd bought him when he decided he wanted to have root access, too.
"What?! No C drive? What did you do with it, I saw you putting it in when you built that machine with spare parts!"
Yes. But it's not actually called a C drive in Linux or any other UNIX variant...
"That's preposterous! Just where the hell am I supposed to save my files then? Hmmm?"
Uhh... /home/$USERNAME comes to mind... (almost told him to save his things to /dev/null but figured it would only cause me more work in the long run)
So, he went with IIS after I left, because it seemed more intelligent to him.
Catastrophic failure is usually idiocy's best reward.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
As much as I love OS X and cocoa, I would hardly call them standard.
Nobody cares about GUI administration tools, not even MS. In ASP.NET, the server is managed with plain text XML configuration files, just like I always wanted it to be.
.NET is years ahead of the "let's make a GUI for everything" stage, while linux/unix is still stuck there. Why would I want a GUI for a daemon?
Unfortunately unless you want to do programming, apache does NOT have a decent XSLT plugin (see Microsoft's XSLISAPI2.1)
Why is this necessary? That question is asked by the same people that complain about XML config files, when kludgy comma delim files have worked for them just fine (so did punch-card electric bills!)
Hey boy, did I ever tell you, you look mighty cute in dem jeans? Bend over and this here donkey will fuck ya up de ass.
GUIs are wonderful to have for the novice, but for most experts, they only get in the way. I administer redundant machines, where the config files must be exact matches except for IP addresses. So I use variables for the IP addresses, and run the config through a perl filter and distribute! Anybody want to try that with a GUI?
I think a GUI for apache configuration would be a good to for those first learning apache. Potentially, you could even plug the apache manual into the GUI tool to provide contextual help. It would be a great way to get started with Apache. (I teach a class on managing web servers, focusing on Apache - students would certainly benefit from a GUI tool that would show possible options for a directive). But as an administrator of a production site, I certainly wouldn't want it! Give me vi and a text file, I'll reconfigure the server without a single click of the mouse (well, except maybe to copy & paste).
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
No one on the planet is interested in bizarre new Internet technology except those selling it. Normal people ignored WAP. Normal people ignore all things flash except that elf bowling game. Normal people are still pissed with those websites with DHTML all over the place yet alone ASP times. Look at Macafee, they were the first to try this bullshit web services bis, and it disappeared very quickly. People dont want to buy things 99% of the time they are online to read and look at pictures. I think these fuckers would find that 99.999999% of people just get pissed off when technology attempts to break down the barriers between a website and their credit card. web services is a bullshit e-word that will go the way of all the other e-crap.
i think, after all the lay offs we see this summer, the R&D of comercial software projects will get the big break down in the next months - and, what will the layed off programmers do meanwhile? open source...
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
Even ex Microsofter's like Zope. Check out spoke technologies. Of course they are still brainwashed by their Microsoft stock portfolios, but at least they are running on Linux.
Many megacorps have millions of dollars invested in Oracle.
MS SQL is way cheaper than Oracle already. They don't care. They like Oracle's uptime. 'Cause when your accounting database goes down, you can lose very large sums of money very quickly.
Oracle gets to charge its frightening fees for that reason, and that reason alone. Nobody minds that it's uber-expensive (well, not too much anyway) because it's dependable.
Netscape was never dependable. ;)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I know I keep hearing a claim that the JVM supports dozens of languages. You even provided a link.
.Net and the JVM.
But my question is...
Are any of these actually being used? Or are they just experiments.
That's the difference between
The whole problem with Linux/open source/any thing not MS is that they are not easy to use. Why waste my freaking time with Linux and Unix and all that file based bullshit? I have life! I'll take my registry hacks and my $110,000 a year job and be quite happy to wish Mr. Gates a long life. cheers
Hell no! I've administered to IIS and Apache servers for years, and all that IIS's GUI ever does is get in the way.
I have to agree. IIS's admin GUI is a complex, jumbled mess full of tabs, sub-screens, 'advanced' buttons, etc.
Apache's not exactly point and click, but the documentation is clear, the config file is easy to read, and I can move sites from server to server with ease. I can also set up all sorts of cool stuff like URL rewriting.
It would be nice if some of the distros included a GNOME or KDE GUI for Apache, though.
Which begs the question of Apache's marketing budget, or Linux. 8-page glossy pullouts don't move mindshare, 30-second StuporBowl spots don't move mindshare, the casual chat at the table after the staff meeting moves mindshare. So start talking.
illegitimii non ingravare
That frightning license guarding the download pages of Sun has not only helped them to fence off Microsoft's Java VM but is a major PITA having a decent Java implementation on the non-supported plattforms, like the BSDs. Even under the supported Linux plattform, the quality of the Java implementation is worse than under Win32.
So, lets help ourselves. But how?
Both the gcj people (Java to natice code compiler of the GCC) and the Kaffee folks (a free VM) face the obstacle of not being able to bind against SUNs Java libs that contain native code. Thus they are forced to write either their own pure or native versions of that enormous sized Java libraries. Java is a great plattform, as long as you use Sun's implementation.
This means lots of unnecessary work for a free implementation.
Plus add the cultural differences of the mostly C and C++ open source folks with the Java crowd.
Looking at the above reponses it is clear you were talking out of your ass.
People have no fucking shame these days.
In my job I've used BRL in many small-to-medium projects, plus another project larger than BRL itself that my employer isn't ready for me to talk about. I'm training two coworkers in Scheme/BRL.
The Kawa manual has an appendix listing projects using it.
Hi.
I walked around and thought that Apache, PHP and MySQL/PostgreSQL/etc. would cut it along way, when it came to creating web-pages with dynamic web-content. Which it also does. But this article brought my perception into a new light. Because if we wan't to utilize open source software in the future, we probably need a framework that does the job.
Rather than creating a lot of nice/not-so-nice solutions in PHP, one might use tools suited and tested and proven stable to run an entire business.
Have you taken a look at the sites in the top 10? Two or three static web pages, if that. The only traffic these sites are getting is from the link on Netcraft. It would be much more interesting to see the uptime of sites with dynamic content. I would love see to the uptimes of JSP/EJB sites (my guess is one week tops).
Sorry, first time out here...
ManiaC++
This is a great article, because he gives a solution to the problem that he sees. The solution also makes sense. Sun is doing good things with J2EE and it makes sense for open source to hop on board that band wagon.
In the enterprise, Java is highly respected (I know, I talk to these guys) and it has a first mover advantage. It's time to captilise on that.
b. Also when was the last time you found a programmer who wanted to do documentation, program documentation is almost an oxymorron. Book publishers print the documentation. in M$ you buy the program liciense and get the documentation for free, in open source you buy the documentation and get the program for free.
C. M$ has it's own UI inconsistencies, especial with right click actions, also in linux if the UI can't do it, you can always hand edit a text file for configuration, frequently hard but do-able with a little research of the available doc. In M$ if you can do it with the UI, it's usualy impossible for an above average user to do.
D. want good fonts? go to M$, they have them, you just can't bundle'em with non-M$.(that's my understanding)
E. Coding standards don't make good code just like type setting doesn't make good books. I hate machine generated code, it's overwritten, redundant, hard to read, nearly impossible to modify by hand but it sure standardized! The design-walk-through-code-document-test cycle is more inportant than where you put the { after an if command
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Isn't the definition of "I/O bound" in regard to a process is that such a process spends most of its time doing/waiting on I/O (like "waiting on database queries and user input")?
As for high-performance languages, java runs on a virtual machine which is a layer of translation, even with dynamic compilation techniques. C++ is large and complex (can anyone honestly say they understand and know how to use most of the features in C++ that are not in C?).
Clearly Code Red illustrates exactly how popular IIS really is! Thousands and thousands are running IIS! Is it important if they actually KNOW they are using it?
... oh yeah, another thing. I can definitely see incentive NOT to update your Microsoft products if you are using any -- sometimes they REMOVE features or add restrictions you didn't want to have! I hate that! And then SP6 caused more problems than it solved... sheesh. What a roller-coaster ride!! And oh yeah, Installing Office updates somehow mysteriously updated my MS Outlook EXPRESS?????? What's THAT about?? (I run Outlook Express on one of my machines and when I use it for hotmail, I don't want to see the stupid banner ad at the bottom... so I use an older version since it doesn't have the banner ad problem.) Oh well...
Microsoft has impressed me yet AGAIN with how clever they are! Increase market share in web servers by having unsuspecting users run it for you!!
Actually, today I recieved a phone call from a [moronic] friend who "contracted Code Red" (I can't keep up with all the variants). He told me somehow he got a "trojanized" (his word, not mine; I would have said 'trojanated') explorer.exe or something like that. I just laughed... then I realized he was on a dialup account. He asked me about how to clean up his problem and I had to walk him through how to run fdisk over the phone... (Yes, that's pretty moronic!) This completely reinforces a prior argument I had regarding why Microsoft should be sued by non-Microsoft-users. Microsoft has put out product in such a way that it put the entire internet at risk. There is no reasonable expectation that its users will be smart enough to apply all patches, keep them up to date or even know that they have services running that they don't want! Now it has proven to be a menace to the whole of the internet and resulted in restrictions for @home users and such unfairly. Ooops... I didn't mean to go on and on about this...
Oh hey, if I still have all of your attention, does anyone know of httpmail software for Linux? I'd prefer one that downloads from HTTPMail (Hotmail) and places them in a local mail account kinda like fetchmail. That would REALLY rock.
Umm... The GUI tool in IIS is simply an easy way to get at the Metabase where all the configurations are saved.
There are tools and such available to dump this out into a text file, or you could write a script to compare between the two servers.
It's not that difficult, and from a scripting perspective far far easier to deal with than the "dumb" text files.
Microsoft is moving back to text configures in IIS6. Although they'll be XML files this time around, which will help alleviate the scripting problems of "dumb" text files.
Apache decreased, what, 1.5% or something? This is somehow a signal of the end of Open Source? When Microsoft loses a dime a share, does that signal its imminent demise too?
Let's get real.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
We keep the porn sites, you keep all the dot-com startup. There, end of the battle.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
You will die slowly with the rest of your kind.
Seriously, the article has a few good points. E.g., a decent standard gui administration tool would be nice.
Of course, how long until MS starts trumeting the cool P2P aspects of IIS? You know, Code Red contacts other IIS systems, each contacting others, eventually building a gnutella-like network...
Buy Hex-Rated Stuff, fight the DMCA!
Of course the IIS share is going to go up, it's enabled by DEFAULT in 2000 server!!
in the end business controls it all. laws, software and so on. if MS can pull of .net and deliver all the stuff they have promised and more. business will switch but in a slowing economy i doubt many penny obsessed companies are ready to make a the jump specifically for cash reasons. so if apache can stay streamlined flexible and cheap it will stay a large competitor in the business world
"You have the right to remain fabulous!" -Chief Clancy Wiggam
Not quite, you rascist retard!
I would like to see the netcraft study after all of the unintentional IIS sites are shut down because of CodeRed.
Java's link should include an http, as in http://java.sun.com
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
That's http://java.sun.com/, not java.sun.com.
We're coming to a point to where the commercial software companies who release open source software are losing their asses. So what else can they do? Keep the good stuff closed.. do what ever they can to keep their heads above water.
Are YOU listed?
How about Loki? Eazel? VA Linux Systems (hardware)? GNUPC? Linuxcare? Corel's Linux? Are these red herrings as well?
What matters is the tool is right for the job. Apache is often the right tool for the job, and it certainly shows.
Looking at Apache vs IIS, I don't think there is a lot to worry about. From the average user's viewpoint, Linux is a server OS, and Windows is a desktop OS. I don't think normal people will run Linux on their desktop's anytime soon, nor do I think that the majority of people will operate Windows based servers. Of course there are always expections. But of all of the Open Source projects, I think Apache will be the last to go.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
Please don't post here anymore.
.NET works out as intended. If it does (and it might), exit Apache. If it doesn't, Apache will be ok, if only because a lot of sysadmins at server farms prefer Apache over IIS for security reasons. Or because most ISP's (over here, in Europe, at least) run *nix instead of NT (2000) and IIS just doesn't run that well on .nix. Sure, Windows 2000 ft. IIS has made inroads, because, finally, there's a Windows That Doesn't Suck, but to say that Apache is doomed is going a little too far.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Will sure help Microsoft's market share.
Apache wont die. Maybe it will become less popular commercially, but it wont die. All the people who cant afford commercial hosting (like me!) will use it. Its always nice to have a free alternative.
What would a user rather have -- a free server that does plain webserving, or a moderately priced one that does webserving plus e-commerce? Faced with such an adversary, does a plain webserver stand a chance, much less one that is virtually stagnant? True, the dramatic drop in Apache's market share comes from just two large ISPs, but will they be the only ones to switch?
.net people. You know, the people over at MS that think we want to plug in our websites like our TV sets, pay metered fees to a webservices provider, and pretend we are actually running a business.
I don't know about you, but I think this guy is a shill for the
I'd rather run my own shit web-server wise, and then have someone like Loudcloud style business model advise me on the e-commerce and user interface and stuff like that - then do it myself.
So many companies are going bust these days, outsourcing the very marketing and user interface of one's e-business is like getting one's automotive steel supply from a steelmaker that is 40% likely to go bankrupt in the next year.
Linux et al is for the radical libertarian survivors out there. Like the Ford corporation, which was one of the first vertical integration innovators, with control of its supply chain, you should know from mouth to anus what your company, and industry, is up to at any given moment.
You can always control and update your own software, and pay for technical advice when needed instead of metered-cost tushy wiping from a big e-services provider that's going to give you shitty tech support anyway.
Goat sex free since 2001
Yes, it is true that Microsoft's Products sure do a lot to encompass multiple aspects of the net community, but people better look at the big picture as to what their plans are. Everyone laughs at World Domination, but taking over the web server market is one hell of a step. Apache is (soon could be "would"?) one of Open Source's best arguments, and if that is lost, dwindling popularity in the server market can become very inevitable.
Just my thought...
Darcy
Right now, PHB is in a panic and their site is still down, because NT+IIS really isn't easier then UN*X+Apache , despite what MS says in Pointed Haired Boss Weekly
Next month, we'll see a 1.5% gain in Apache use as the Pointy Haired Bosses are sacked and replaced by an Apache admin who is able to restore the UNIX partition from backup :)
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
- Complete end-end asynchronous kernel mode protocol capable of handling 15,000 simultaneous connections at over 15,000 request/responses per second.
- Completely transparent linear scalability
- Totally transparent fault tolerance
- 100% open standards based, using SOAP/XML
- Backed by a multi-phase distributed linearly
scalable transparently fault tolerant database that is fully transactional and ACID compliant across the cluster.
The beta will be released in September. It will not be delayed. This web service solution will change the way people create services and applications on the net. It will change the way the world uses databases.It was written by someone who cares passionately about every clock cycle and who would write new database filesystems to ensure maximum performance.
It was essentially designed by committee, which means that while it has features to serve just about anyone's needs, it isn't exactly a good performer in any area. Apache is actually pretty slow when compared to commercial web servers such as IIS or iPlanet, and even pretty slow when compared to open source web servers such as Tux.
So really, what's the big deal here? Why should anyone care what kind of "market share" a not-for-profit software project has, anyway? It's not like open source is a competition.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
I will give you a word/phrase, and i would like you to respond with the first relevant thing about it that seems to come to mind in the context of this article. Ready? I could do my own analysis, but i'm curious to see what you'd come up with. Let's see if this works, or if we get anything meaningful or any interesting arguments. Here are your words:
I wouldn't worry about Apache losing out to Java. Some of the best Java software developed out there is done by the Apache group at jakarta.apache.org. I use several of the projects daily such as Ant, Tomcat, Struts, Log4J. They're all well done and Tomcat is even the reference implementation of the Servlet and JSP specifications. So my point is that even if the web has shifted towards services I think Apache will find its place.
Take EJB for instance. What a bloated overhyped piece of crap. There's so much bullshit from Sun about EJB when the bloody thing just plain doesn't work. Just about every project is better off with just using servlets and standard beans and their own persistence instead of relying on the slow and crappy CMP. EJB is bullshit and so is the dotNet crap and all that web services circus. It seems to me that good coders with PHP and apache knowledge seem to be able to pull a better magic than all the Javas and dotNets of this world. I'd say OpenSource is not missing the bandwagon at all unless you have a bandwagon of hype in mind.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Service this!
jew lover
The huge, big point here is the thing about J2EE vs .NET - that's the focus moving forward. Where we really don't have any other answer but J2EE. dotGNU/Mono/whatever are going to come so damn late it won't matter.
Clusterable, component-based architecture is where it's heading, and PHP/modPERL/whatever ain't doing it NOW. The corp world has gone n-tier architecture, and other than using Apache to front-end WebLogic/WebSphere/whatever, most open source stuff is far behind.
Don't even WASTE your time whining about where they got their numbers on Apache - figure out what to do to address the big picture of web services. What do we got? Not much, JBoss is it as far as I know of for non-vaporware offerings. Tomcat is cool, but it only does servlets and JSP - Tomcat is NOT a bean container. Beans (way stupid, misleading name) are the componentized pieces of code that are needed to beat .NET.
He nailed it on the head - The same way we've been harping about the world changing and rendering Microsoft irrelevant, the way the Open Source world does things is pretty much irrelevant and obsolete as well.
His point about finishing the Open Source versions of j2EE (like way quickly now too) is pretty much the only way we are not going to fall behind. We don't have the time to architect some beautiful dream, we need to shit or get off the pot NOW, it's starting to stink in here!
Why don't you come down to Alabamy and talk shit son, i got a tree you and yer nigger pappy can swing from.
Zionism is racism. Until those kikes give up their racist policies I'll continue to support Ralph JewHater Nader's posting on Slashdot.
Thank you
So long as Oracle is the best database around, then they will be using Apache as their web server. So Apache will be around for a long long time. Note i didn't say best open source database, or what database i use at home (postgresql), or which one all the zealots are using this week... -stomp69
"In a few years from now, it will either be a Java-Linux world, or a .NET world. The choice is ours."
I highly doubt that one will win out on the other totally. Either there will be somewhat of a crossover in the technology or a new candidate will come into the frey. Apache is solid, IIS has been proven to be somewhat insecure. Yes, as IIS becomes more stable it will be accepted by a wider audience.
"Now this is going to be controversial and will not win me many friends, but I think the Open Source community has to get real about a couple of things."
That comment I totally agree with, if the Open Source community wants to compare itself to, and compete with companies that are driven by profit, they have to appeal to the people that use the products for profit, Microsoft sees this, and takes advantage of the fact that people want solutions that can be developed quickly, trading a loss in performance and security for a solution that is first to market. The point about the lack of a GUI config for Apache is a good point, and should not be brushed off by those (including me) that don't have a problem configuring a httpd.conf file through vi (or emacs).
Companies are looking for solutions that require less cost in implementing, and when you (well, not most programmers, but the management "you") compare the cost of training someone to use Apache vs pressing a button to run IIS.....
http://www.codewolf.com - Just good stuff to waste time
Which web server you choose is an operating platform decision rather than application decision.
Nobody just wakes up one morning and says "wow, I'm going to switch from Apache to IIS". Rather, if a switch is made it's a much broader move from an MS platform to a UNIX platform, or vice-versa.
Anyone who's worked in an IT facility knows that changing platforms (or even allowing non-homogenous platforms in the first place) is a huge decision, and rightfully so.
So when people talk about relative market shares of IIS vs Apache, know that they are really talking about Microsoft vs Linux (or maybe MS vs UNIX, but you get the idea).
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
Dig it.
MS is just dying for this kind of FUD and BS. So, the netcraft study shows many IIS sites. What about all the virtually hosted sites Apache runs?
Coming from a dot-bomb that preached web services as the solution to every problem and the wave of the future, I see nothing to worry about in this article. The concept of web services as proposed by .NET doesn't boost anything other than Microsoft's bottom line as far as I can tell.
What all the pundits who praise the concepts behind a technology seem to keep missing is that just because you can do something doesn't mean people are willing to pay for it. Look at WAP, sure I've done work with it, but I wouldn't buy a phone with it now and I certainly wouldn't pay a premium for services that can be delivered better and cheaper through an alternate medium. The internet is just another communications pipeline - the stock market and the dot-com shakeups have proved the fact that it is not ipso facto a revenue stream. Have 900 numbers and pay-per-view revolutionized our telephone and cable systems?
When someone shows me a real use for .NET, maybe I'll take a look again but for now Apache fits the bill pretty damn well as far as our business model and budget are concerned. If we need web services with our clients, PTP holds far more promise for keeping our data where we want it - out of Microsoft's hands.
Code Red
Any questions?
"...Apache hasn't introduced any significant user features in two years. (For example, has Apache even managed to deliver a standard GUI configuration tool in all this time?)"
And, why is a GUI necessary for configuration of a web server. It's already (finally) becoming clear that server administrators need to know how to do more than just aim their mouse and click. Insufficient security training is being acknowledged as a business liability.
Sure web services are useful and may very well become the business model of tomorrow, but define it. Your company's soon-to-be-released new revolutionary product line won't be authored in WordXP or ExcelXP documents on some other company's server. If that's a "Web Service" the author is thinking of, it's not and won't become a business model anyone will buy. Interactive applications is probably one of the more viable prospects, and Apache does not offer such interactivity natively. Apache hasn't really advanced much in a couple years, but does that mean it's dead? You can plug a helluva lot more into Apache to make it an interactive, secure, and functional application server for the web than anything IIS will ever produce.
And, you don't need to reboot your whole flipping server when Apache, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or mod_mp3, or whatever else you've rolled into that application server submits a security patch. Just apply the patch and kick start the service. Ouch! That was painful....
Apache is far from dead or dying. It probably won't come with a GUI configurator/wizard thingy. Should it?
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
I may not be up on this whole 'web services' thing, but wouldn't it be possible to implement some of this stuff in apache modules?
I forgot that Netcraft requires nearly weekly "checking" of your own sites to ensure the Linux/Apache combination are always near the top. I forgot to fix the results over the last couple of weeks. Sorry, dudes.
Perhaps some others forgot to re-list their sites as well?
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
The latest netcraft survey can be found here: http://www.netcraft.com/survey/
What would a user rather have -- a free server that does plain webserving, or a moderately priced one that does webserving plus e-commerce?
first, a user does not care. the only thing a user is concerned with is making the damn computer work so he/she can get his/her job done quickly enough to remain employed. second, not every company/organization needs or wants to be involved in direct sales on the web, or b2b, or whatever the current hot thing is. third, and I think most important: by themselves, web server software packages (apache, iis, whatever) make little difference. the add-ons such as e-commerce packages, hookups to already existing databases, etc., are what make the difference. if you really want to find out who's winning the war, worry about which 'e-commerce' software is being used at more installations as well as how many people are using what webserver.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
For example, has Apache even managed to deliver a standard GUI configuration tool in all this time
Personally, I find the straight forward Apache configuration much easier than the IIS config.
What would a user rather have -- a free server that does plain webserving, or a moderately priced one that does webserving plus e-commerce? Faced with such an adversary, does a plain webserver stand a chance, much less one that is virtually stagnant? True, the dramatic drop in Apache's market share comes from just two large ISPs, but will they be the only ones to switch?
Much of the article takes about IIS's integration. I'll install several packages thank you. If you look a little, you can find up-to-date scripts that get and install a miriad of packages together. Oh, yeah, and rpms and apt-get.
Then it ends up to ba a pro J2EE article...
check out the longest running servers report and try to find a Windows machine. Not a single one!
I work in a large company that does LOTS of internal devolopment in a large scale ( we do all sorts of apps and are very compute intensive ). While apache as a web server is nice in the end it didn't stack up. Course neither did IIS. However here is what we learned. 1) First and foremost Vendors prefer to work with IIS on NT, even though they admit unix in general is a better more stable solution NT was easier and quicker to get there app up to speed under presure. 2) Apache is nice and cheap, but just doesn't have the support needed application wise for an enterprise solution. 3) Although turnkey solutions are MORE expensive up front, in the end they generally do save you time and money in development costs ( if they really work ). 4) Web portals and application servers many times do not support apache. Were did we compromise. While apache was a much better and easier to administer web server that was a small piece of the puzzle. Plug in components, commercial support from 3rd parties made apache unusable. The winner IPlanet for both NT and Solaris unless IIS was required on NT for the app ( many times it was )
Good point! I say HELL NO! You can do so many things by mastering Apache's configuration file that NONE of the existing Apache GUI's can begin to touch on. I've played around with every one I've ever gotten my hands on, and they all come up severely lacking.
The trend is that IIS is gaining little and apache is gaining alot wiht small ups and downs while the others fade away at the exepense of apache/IIS.
With the code red worm and all the latest news about security holes in IIS/NT, I believe corporate mindshare has dwindled quite alot. I have a relative who works at FedEX(one of the huge victims of code red), and bussiness was down for close to 2 days. They are a mainly unix vased company trying to adopt to win32 but now they are having second thoughts.
Go look at the chart and you will see that apache usually wiggles up and down while it rises. Also expect the number of apache installs to rise up significantly due to some bussinesses worried about security holes of Microsoft products. However the introduction of WinXP may change this. I assume college students who are not cs-majors will form their own webpages with IIS because its there on their computers for free.
http://saveie6.com/
The only people I see digging .NET is people like my fat IT Manager, and if .NET wins, I will be more than happy buried in my bunker with my Freenet node and IPCHAINS set to -j DENY all port 80 traffic.
>Let's get real.
.net becomes real, MS can toast Quicken at will. Then consider what the X-Box portends, beside entry into the lucrative gaming market and a route beyond the static PC business.
.net, bringing the new territory 'into the fold' and making it immune to assault - Microsoft Forever.
.net. Instead, Microsoft learned from the problems of Java, in addition to attacking it, so that .net has emerged stronger in its first existence, however vaprous.
It is real. Unfortunately, take a look at history. With only a few exceptions, every time Microsoft loses a market battle, they come back stronger, only to lose, again. Eventually they come back and win.
Then (and here's the history for you) the competition lays over and dies. Again, with only a few exceptions, (not universal, but darned close) every time Microsoft wins, they win for good.
To be more concrete and less pessimistic about it, we have to hope Open Source and Linux fit into the exception side of that. But in order to do so, one must look at exactly what Microsoft is really doing. Whenever they pick one of these battles, it tends to be 'near' their core competence. Even though they lose several times, they've got the deep pockets to keep at it. When they finally win, it is close enough to their core to quickly become part of the body, instead of an extension. Kind of growing by engulfing markets, like an amoeba.
They are generally smart enough to not attempt something too far from their core. The few times they have ventured too far are when they've been stymied. Quicken and Talisman, to name two. Incidentally, once
It's now becoming apparent that there are at least three fronts on the battle with Linux and Open Source. First is legal, with patents and the like. Next is web services, essentially negating the positive values Unix (and clones) bring to the web of mere reliability by raising the bar on base function. That way Unix no longer 'meets requirements' because it is missing thise 'essential' Win-services, no matter what the reliability. Finally, consolidate those web services with the desktop - the focus of
Perhaps this is the real tragedy of Java, because in many respects it formed the underpinnings of competition to
The real question is how the Open Source community should respond. You can quote me on this one, if we simply stand behind reliability and laugh at Microsoft's security holes and crashes, WE ARE TOAST.
We need a better response to Microsoft. IMHO part of the process will be "Walling them off in the US." There are several factors in our favor here, one of the foremost being other countries' distrust of the US-based Micro$oft Corporation. Second is the MS revenue model, putting them beyond reach of the third world, where the bulk of the growth is going to occur.
So as a US citizen, I suspect I must advocate not wasting a lot of time on unique requirements of our market. Please fight the battles in South America, in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. They are *much* more important to Linux and Open Source. I suspect in the USA it now pivots around the release of Windows XP as a litmus test. If the courts allow it to happen as-is, Microsoft will feel it a green light to do anything they want, and the genie will be back out of the bottle that has been partially constraining it for a few years, now.
Yes, Virginia, they sky IS falling. There are simply too many defunct companies who failed to heed the warning for us to fail to heed it this time.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
To implement a simple web service, one doesn't even need a "web server" at all! Just instantiate the xml-rpc server in Python or Perl, or instantiate a SOAP server in Java. And apache can certainly hook into any of these things just as well as IIS can. As for the other things... well, UNIX types have been living without Microsoft's hold-your-hands-and-stick-handcuffs-on-them pre-rolled 'architectures' & components & and everything else.
As the article says, Reduced to the technological basics, it's just XML over HTTP. Are we seriously saying that Apache has some sort of problem serving XML over HTTP? I think the author has bought into the "Web Services!" hype and seriously over-estimates the problems in creating them. Web services are not cool because of technology. They're cool because we're finally finding formats that we can all practically agree on for remote procedure calls.... shorn of the hype, web services are purely social innovations. Microsoft had to hook tech to it to attract the attention of people who are driven by flash, but the tech is almost incidental.
If we were wiser 5 years ago, there's no technological impediment to creating web services then... but there's no known way to shortcut the aquisition of wisdom.
Hey lame ass mods, if you actually read the article you would see the auther includes some sketchy ramblings comparing microsoft to hitler.
So if hitler offends you, bitch to the author not me.
Joe got Suzie back to his bachelor pad and they slowly took their clothes off. He found out the she was a he! And he certainly wanted to talk a walk on her wyld syde. He'd been harbouring homoerotic fantasies for yonks. Now was his chance to bring those adolescent dreams to fruition....
There are a lot of cool projects going on over there, the most famous of which is Tomcat, an excellent (and free!) J2EE servlet engine (which Sun has made *the* reference implementation of their servlet spec). In the web services game, servlets are the point men. The author should have at least brought up the Jakarta name... although he probably would have lost his own arguement if he did :-P
Still, I think it was a good article overall. All the World War II analogies were quite entertaining.
Why can't I post this right? It just goes to preview instead. WTF. Oh well. Perhaps if I type a bunch of shit here it will think its a real post. You are not logged in. You can login now using the convenient form below, or Create an Account. Posts without proper registration are posted as Anonymous Coward You are not logged in. You can login now using the convenient form below, or Create an Account. Posts without proper registration are posted as Anonymous Coward You are not logged in. You can login now using the convenient form below, or Create an Account. Posts without proper registration are posted as Anonymous Coward dog
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Strange, I already submitted this.
At first it's talking about how apache is losing market share because it doesn't have a GUI configuration tool. Then it moves right along to make sarcastic comments about dotGNU and how it was written by a desktop applications company. And finally, sugests that java is the answer to all your problems.
.NET was over hyped. Corel is talking about how their new word processor will be fully .NETiffied and how wonderfull that will be. Aparently you'll be able to pay for components individually and get them from all different vendors. You could get your GUI from Corel and your spell checker from Some Other Company! WOW!!! "That's just like open source but even better because you don't have the source code!!!"
These are my favorite quotes from the article:
"There is an excellent Open Source J2EE server called JBoss" But later it says:
"There is nothing in the Open Source stables to match J2EE"
On the other hand, I'm biased because I've always felt that
Of course, some apps are going to move to the internet and but word processors? Sheesh.
Apache's not an app server. It's a HTML server.
All the Web Services development I've done so far has involved Apache, whether it's called Apache or IBM Websphere. I code using JSP and servlets under Tomcat and we deploy on a WebSphere application server. (Someone argued with me two weeks ago that Websphere's app server is just Tomcat under the covers, but I didn't believe him. Maybe I'm wrong.)
Read this: it may not change your life, but it might just change your mind. If it does, mod it up ;)
Zope has Enterprise-level scalability and is the closest OS competitor to the most advanced Java app servers, with much, much more and no Java BS.
However, Zope is more advanced than those, and has now:
Improvments being made continually via current Projects:
Zope is open-source, works well with Apache and Squid, has great RDB abilities. It naturally exposes objects for publishing using a strong, easy to use security model. It supports authentication off of LDAP, NT Domains, RADIUS, etc. It's odb catalog features allow the development of applications that use dynamic queries to organize content (and potentially code) objects. It's the strongest suite of features for web-services oriented middleware out there, because it has a several year lead in many respects on the competition! Python is XP, so it has the same advantages as a CLR, provided it is coupled with an XP GUI component model or class library, like PyXPCOM (Mozilla) or wxWindows (Unix, Win32, Mac). Last, but not least, it is easy to develop for.
An open challenge to all the folks trying to develop their own toolkits from scratch (dotGNU, Mono, etc): DON'T - instead use something that is already proven in this problem domain: Zope and Python!
www.zope.org
www.python.org
I don't trust those survey. Common sense , in this month , how can IIS increase the market share ? IIS / NT things under attack by Code Red. I am not stupid enough to choose it as my web server at least I will wait till someone told me this kind of loophole fixed.
Sneer at the article all you want, but he has some excellent and valid points. Having just been through a 7 month design for a customer portal and e-commerce site for my company, I can tell you that this man is right. I actually argued for a Apache + PHP approach to our system. I'm QUITE glad that I lost the argument becuase we'd still be trying to scale that approach.
.NET. I saw the Java Community Process in action at JavaOne and it's actually quite impressive. I went to many seminars where it turned out that Sun's own implementations for Java in the JCS were voted down in favor of externally derived ideas. One of the noted speakers was one of the major developers for Tomcat and the Apache-Jakarta project (Sorry, I forget the name now). Tomcat is a wonderful platform that is an early concept of how the Open Source community can rally around a not-quite-open source product.
I attended JavaOne in June. Granted, it's a 17,000 attendee propaganda show but you'd be amazed at a lot of the software coming out of companies that are doing J2EE. Application platforms like Oracle 9iAS, iPlanet and IONA are amazingly powerful and robust. The J2EE implementation has 5 years of maturity behind it. Microsoft, while honestly having some interesting ideas, is at least 3 years of development effort behind Sun. It's a complete framework that handles everything from massive database connectivity to advanced XML parsing with technology such as XSL, DOM and SAX to guaranteed-delivery messaging systems for distributed applications.
Java is not free software or open source, but it's a lot better than
Open Source would do well to embrace Java as much as possible. Eventually Java will turn into C, where there are many compilers and run-time environments available for all sorts of uses and needs. It's already happening comercially from a lot of companies who have a good idea and are running with it, such as KADA Systems for J2ME. Sun's primary interest in Java is a Microsoft-killer and if they have to relinquish more control to get that they will. Remember that at its core, Sun is a hardware and OS company, not a programming/application company like Microsoft.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
I've been run over by so many bandwagons in the last 7 years that I don't think I have enough energy left to jump on the J2EE war wagon. I'm older, but I'm going into grad school and I'm not coming out! Still, I have to agree with the author: Linux/Open Source people tend to be purists at the expense of having anything for the real world public. I think .NET has a lot of people worried, and that's good. A few voices have been screaming about getting something for the real world, but I think they're largely ignored by the pencil-necks that just want to hack a kernel onto the erasure of a mechanical pencil. If anything, the author is dead on about the proud, old Unix world chasing MS's tailights on .NET. I say go with Java. It's from a BSD-derived company and started by J. Gosling, a good guy. Why not?
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
Would that be an effect of Code Red. It made a lot realize that they WERE running a web server after all! That's a plan from MS: make sure that every IIS server can be counted.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I think I see the problem.
If the slashdot crowd is the cream of the open source crop.. we are doomed.
Most posts have nothing to do with the topic and the rest are child like hippie nonsense.
As long as this is the quality of the "community" M$ will slowly eat our lunch. They have done it before and it looks like they will do it again.
Shitdot needs to try to increase the level of discourse. The brain dead moderators are not helping. Not to mention hemos, taco and the other clowns can barley spell much less know the difference between "then" and "than".
A key measurement on what is the software platform for web servers is a quick sampling of what skills are being asked for. Here is Dallas, Texas, the vast majority of web server / e-commerce jobs appear to require IIS / ASP / VBScript skills. No Apache, no mod_perl, just Microsoft.
How about Zope? How come it wasn't mentionned at all?
As soon as he started reading the minds of the users who switched. It would be bad enough as pure speculation, but if he'd done his homework he would have found out if someone had already accounted for the change. As it happens, someone has.
Apparently, a major client (IIRC including NSI) switched hosting companies from an Apache shop to an IIS shop. Host enough domains and that will do it, but it only reflects a business decision on the part of one company almost totally divorced from technical issues.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I heard some sad news on trolltalk this morning - Puerto Rican street lawyer John Saul Montoya was found dead in his New Yawk City barrio apartment this morning. I'm sure we'll all miss him - even if you didn't respond to his trolls you've probably visited his web site. Truly a troll icon.
I thought i remember reading this on c/net or cnn.com or something.( Too lazy to look it up)
Anyway if this is true then I am sure the phb who suggested IIS because ms "said so" is probably in the unemployed line today. I am sure they regret the decision. If its over a million sites then yes, a %5 rise would be expected sadly. But not enough to scare corporate america into IIS.
http://saveie6.com/
1) I must be missing the point. The way the nay-sayers talk, you'd think Apache hasn't been used an e-com solution at all. Hello? 63% of the web servers out there aren't all showing pictures of the family dog and cousin Shirley's wedding.
2) I also don't see why ASP is so highly touted here. It's slow, and it gets slower when you need to add functionality that PHP has built in. Granted, it'd be nice if satellite was no longer an experimental module and we could usher in a boatload of CORBA fun, but there are always other solutions, aren't there? Like, write your component to the CORBA spec, and access it using C-based CGI?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Apache's decrease is minimal and fluctuations like this happened before. Netcraft's survey indicates that Apache is still growing and its marketshare healthy. Unlike Netscape's case, MS has not been able to grab easily this market. Mr. Prasad is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and is simply luring Apache people to jump to Java before .NET takes off. Not that I dislike Java because JSP runs quite well with Apache+Tomcat in my intranet site and Mr. Prasad does have some valid points to ponder, but using Apache and Linux community as a Sun weapon against MS is disgusting to me, especially when he mentioned all the nonsense about dotGNU and Mono, the Open Source implementations of .NET. So it makes sense to him to make an opensource J2EE framework and nonsense to make an opensource .NET framework, when both are controlled by proprietary companies and when C# was submitted to ECMA and Java not?
¦ ©® ±
There is no evidence that Apache is losing the battle.
From netcraft's survey, Microsoft's servers grew from 5.9M to 8M servers, while Apache only lost 0.08M servers. Where do the new IIS servers come from? My theory is that most likely a lot of average joes (with cable/dsl access) are installing full winXP and win2k (which includes IIS) during last month. What do you think?
(Before I continue - no, I am not a Novell employee, and no, Novell is not dead) .NET is to build something around some other (non-MS) technology.
I think Ganesh is on to something here - the only way to compete with
Novell did exactly that - created a portal environment by combining Open Source, XML and Java components, while using the existing directory structure for authentication. It is still in early stages, but it does work, and it works incredibly well.
Before I see eyes rolling - yes, portals are basically warmed over web pages, but it is a corporate buzzword du jour. Your average CIO/CTO loves it, and will allow unholy amounts of money to be spent on it.
How does it work? You have an Apache/Tomcat combo sitting on one of four supported platforms (NT, NetWare, Linux or Solaris) and JDK with JNDI. (Java Naming and Directory Interface) When you log in, JNDI taps into your existing LDAP3-supported directory for authentication and profiles (Novell of course hopes you will be using NDS/eDirectory), and presents you with cutomized, pre-formated page (done with XML/XSLT) that contains your mailbox, calendar, MetaFrame apps, news, queries your databases via JDBC, etc.
And now the kicker - because Novell is using Open Source and Java components, this product is about three times cheaper than the first comparable solution - something even CFOs might appreciate.
Why I like this so much? I gives Linux foot in the door. Now I can actually *justify* using a Linux box for a web/application server instead of IIS, and once it proves itself as more stable and secure, more will follow. It may look like a small victory, but wars are usually won that way.
Oh yeah, and an obligatory link:
http://www.novell.com/products/portal/
Those 220,000 new webservers that were just counted this month...
By Incidents.org
Code Red was really MS's way of getting a boost in the server market. Stand up and be counted, IIS servers, 100 threads at a time...
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
That goes a long way in the corporate world (where J2EE is being adapted at a rapid pace), and that's why I think the author has a valid point.
I perfectly agree. I don't know how come Zope has never taken off. Zope and Python are sweet :)
The urgency of this article reminds me of something from the annals of the U.S. Army's JRTC:
Each morning in the African Savannah, the lion wakes up and knows that he must run faster than the slowest gazelle or he will starve. Each morning, the gazelle wakes up and knows that he must run faster than the fastest lion or he will be killed. It does not matter whether you are lion or gazelle: when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
My god, reading through the responses it seems like nobody wants to get out of the nicely worn rut that we've entrenched ourselves in.
.NET hasn't happened yet! It's so vapour, I can't believe that it'll have an effect!' Wake up! It may have no effect, it may have an incredible, unforseen effect. It may wipe us out all together! It'll certainly hit us harder if we don't bother to cover the bases that we seem to be lacking in.
Yeah, Apache runs great, and yeah, it'll probably hold a good deal of market share for a long while, but do you people have no vision at all?
We're gonna have to get of our trench and make some sort of counter-offensive to wow the people that don't currently use Apache and OSS, and to make sure that anybody in the future that thinks about it will make the choice for OSS.
All I'm hearing from you folks is 'this is FUD because
Big changes happen with small starts...look at Linux itself. Don't brush off the 1.5% market share loss...it may be a harbinger of greater (or lesser?) things to come.
This guy is way, way off on a number of things.
1. Web services are going nowhere fast. Dynamic web sites are the most important thing on the web and what most people and businesses care about. Apache is great for dynamic sites.
2. Apache has perfectly good GUI tools for administration. They are not universally used because most people don't want them. It's much easier to use a simple text editor to edit the simple conf file, and you can do it over an SSH connection from your bedroom at 4am. Of course companies like Apple can also slap a simple GUI on top of it and hide that from people, as they have done with the Apache controls in OS X.
3. There is plenty of support for XML-RPC and SOAP from all over the open source world. The implementations I've seen on mod_perl are fast and powerful.
4. Apache 2 is a million miles from "just a better architecture for a vanilla webserver." It is a flexible server platform which can do things that IIS only dreams of. You can write drop-in replacements for the HTTP protocol and take full advantage of all the facilities Apache provides as a server framework. (Hell, you can write new protocols in Perl!)
Only someone who fundamentally doesn't understand technology would say that IIS is somehow providing a web services "platform" while Apache is not.
So it's nothing short of miraculous that Apache managed to retain its market share for about two years while essentially treading water. Let's face it, in spite of a few point releases, Apache hasn't introduced any significant user features in two years.
/these/ are the strengths of Apache.
/any/ job we throw at it. Jakarta is a great example of a web-services enabling extension to the Apache project.
This is a completely unfair statement. While work on a 2.0 release of Apache has been ongoing, development has hardly stalled in the 1.x series. The strength of Apache was never the server itself - It was the modular design. Mod_rewrite, libphp, etc -
Yes, you can run PHP under IIS/Apache for Win - But you have to run it as a CGI. It loses one of it's major strenghs.
Apache is constantly being refined and extended with modules. If the author has any doubts about this, I strongly suggest he 'grep -v ^LoadModule' his httpd.conf. I suspect he would soon realize his Apache did nothing at all.
My guess is the author has never actually admin'd Apache. He's probably been just an Apache user his whole life. (I see nothing to the contrary in his bio at the bottom of the article). Apache is a wonderful tool that is upto
Please excuse the poor thought-line of this post:) I was in a hurry to get my thoughts out the door.
- James
Apache's "market share" is irrelevant. There are plenty of people working on it, and tech support is incredibly easy to come by on IRC, USENET, or Linux users group.
What IS worrisome, is *any* increase in the number of IIS installations. This shit is just too dangerous to have on the net as a springboard for the next bit of malicious code. We need to start polling web servers, and treat any IIS instances that respond just like we treat open mail relays.
Any authors of web browsers out there, add a feature: if the browser hits an IIS server, it should automatically send a note to webmaster@clueless.newbie.still.running.iis.com, and tell them to switch to a securable web server RIGHT NOW.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What a joke. Tomcat SUCKS. The Apache Group got it from Sun. It is awful code. ServletExec is better. Resin is better than that.
Haven't you seen the new Hotmail?
lots of old features no longer work, you get 3 times as much spam as before and half the time you can't even access your account!
yippee!
Why the hell do we have to run out and invent new stuff all the time? I like the web just like it is. I can call up pages and see things. I can interact with pages and do things. Works great. Just because MS and the Java crowd are all busy making more work for themselves doesn't mean I'm going to panic and re-write my web apps. Until browsers fail to render HTML 4.0 / XHTML adaquately I'm going to stay put. Maybe Fortune 500 has a need for all this crap, but I don't.
Zope is cool. Python is cool. But neither have the marketing budget of IIS and ASP.
Why is everyone fighting this so hard? I'm not saying he's right, but as far as I know (which isn't much) he could be right or atleast have a point. Why aren't people admitting this and looking into it? The facts are that MS is pushing hard for .NET. Who knows weather it will succeed or not (GOD I hope not), but why lock the community into supporting MS? Why not support all variations of this topic and/or create our own? Who's to say that the open source people have their finger on all aspects of business? I'm not saying the guy is correct or anything, but it can't hurt to look into it. If Linux did create a .NET type architecture, it would sure hurt MS's future plans and can only help Linux. So why not atleast look into some of this?
I could be way off base here, but turning your backs on all critics and all alternative directions could end up with the OSS community being run around. I for one would hate to see that.
Khyron
The only thing that matters is that the users -- however many or few they may be -- continue to use and love Apache.
Sure:
1 - of course e-commerce apps are run by Apache, but there's a very strong contingent of commercial products that support IIS.
2 - ASP vs PHP religion is irrelevant. What is relevant is how many MS trained people are out there. I have no data beyond my own difficulties in getting people, but I can shake a tree and get ASP devs to rain down upon me, but PHP devs are much harder to find (caveat: I work near Redmond). And as for CORBA development, now that's hard (flame on!)
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
Now they can count all the IIS servers that showed up in their apache logs; the IIS servers that don't have any content and were previously unknown.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Lets see - they're trying to move data processing and storage to a centralized (in some respects) server and move the interface to the client (the web browser). You know what that sounds like? X-Windows. Does web services sound like thin client to anyone else?
What's limiting about web browsers is that you have a very limited range of widgets (and so are limited in what kinds of interfaces you can make). Web browsers also tend to talk to the server infrequently (as compared to normal interface/backend communication in the world of locally run apps). This makes web based services less fat than X is, but X gives you a lot more flexability (maybe too much).
Because X is too fat for much more than running apps over a LAN, something more light weight is needed. How about a protocol that functions similarily to X, but allows one to negotiate the frequency of communication between client and server for a connection? I think that sort of protocol could bridge the worlds of the web and thin client.
Last time I checked most of the pron services are running apache. These are the folks who know what web traffic is. Have you ever seen a pron site run IIS? The answer is not likely, because if most likely would be out of buisness. As long as we have pron, apache will have a fairly large piece of the web server market.
Apache = free
Interchange = free
[My|PG]SQL = free
linux, FBSD, etc = free
These products together outweigh commercial alternatives (with six figure price tags) by a long shot...
Oh, and there ARE GUI config packages for Apache.
Not to mention the fact that an experienced admin can administer an enterprise-level server much more efficiently from a shell. How about remote control? How much bandwidth does an SSH connection use in comparison with RDP?
If you can see past the FUD and misinformation and shotty benchmarks, you will notice that high product prices doesn't mean high quality.
Apache hasn't introduced any significant user features in two years. (For example, has Apache even managed to deliver a standard GUI configuration tool in all this time?)
Yes and? When was the last time you heard of a major security flaw plaguing Apache? I wanna slap you people!
blah
--- sig moved for great justice.
Yep, Apache is a webserver, and we all know what a webserver is. Apparently it will lose market-share to "web services" because it isn't one.
But what is a "web service?" It's just a word! Suppose it's "wakalixes." Apache will lose market-share because it isn't a "wakalix." But IIS is a "wakalix." So far so good, but what does that mean?
Software can have no value proposition unless it is real and performs a real task. The closest thing we see to a definition is "applications advertising their own capabilities, searching for other applications on the web and invoking their services without prior design or negotiation" - but what does this really mean? Do you give programs money to motor around the internet doing - just - stuff?
I challenge Mr. Prasad to post here a concrete example of a "web service" and what it does. That would establish a context for his (maybe valid) criticism of Apache. Without that, well - what are we actually talking about?
I consider the manipulation of httpd.conf to be a key ingredient in seperating the men from the MS wankers. I for one wouldn't bother with a GUI even if it was available.Sure, httpd.conf is a bit intimidating at first, but after a while, it feels like a nice warm blanket -> comfortable...
Odd thing is that Microsoft is explicitly giving up control over C# in its current proposal to the ECMA wheras Sun insisted that it have sole control over the future direction of Java.
If the Open Source Community wants to have an open standards based successor to C then C# looks a better bet than Java at this point.
dotNet is not going to kill Apache for the simple reason that the concept of dotNet requires the ability to take existing applications and wrap a SOAP front end arround them so that other dotNET applications can access their resources.
In the very near future Open Source is going to become a serious threat to Sun's survival. Already Linux is taking serious market share from Sun for the same reason that Office Max furniture is taking market share from Herman Miller's Aeron chair. VC capital is harder to come by and much more impressed by a rack of cheap Linux boxes than a high end Solaris server.
For Sun to survive they have to make sure that their platform is too complex and rapidly changing for the Open Source movement to keep up while all the time pretending that they are on their side.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The RPC equivalnet for web services, SOAP is available from the XML Apache project here. From my personal experience an excellent product , very easy to use and happily works with all kinds of "unsupported" servlet engines. However last time I saw it ( 7 months back ) , it couldn't speak to the Microsoft SOAP implementation because the SOAP header of Microsoft was sending the build number of the product as well as the standard header ;-) ... So much for platform independence of web services.
Naming/discovery equivalent for web services is available from the jUDDI project. It is hosted on sourceforge here
There may be others available as well but I am not aware of them.
As far as the article is concerned its too full of rhetoric ( Mozilla 1.0 on the client and Apache 2.0 on the server. How wonderful it's all going to be! Mozilla supports XUL and a cross-platform component object model! Oooh! It's more than a browser, it's an application platform! Aaah! And Apache 2.0 is both multi-process and multi-threaded, it has a new API for modules, and is so much more stable on Windows! Swoon! ) , based on weak statistics and just assumes all of us will believe "WebServices == Ultra Cool" without telling us why we should believe that.
Forgive me if I'm this is redundant (I didn't read every post), but I was unaware that Open Source was battling anything. I thought the point of Open Source was that we were sick of having to battle. Tired of crappy bloatware that had crappy tech support and cost too much. If there's any battle, of course it's MindShare. The way I see it, who cares if Big Brother wants to pay too much for a product that isn't very good. I thought we were writing Open Source for Ourselves. Even if no one is using Apache in the enterprise, I am using it as a personal web server with Mac OS X. Isn't that the point?
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As far as I know, java is free. Not free in the sense of open source, but free in the sense you don't have to pay to use it.
As a java developer, I can download the newest and fullest java versions (v1.4b2).
But he makes a good point, java isn't slow anymore, it's speeding up.
The whole trend in society worldwide is towards bigness and control. Freedom has fallen by the wayside everywhere else, you silly peons have traded it for security in your petty lives. Why should the internet be any different? The vast majority of people value security over freedom, this silly "software revolution" will fade into obscurity in a few more years. In another five years, the few remaining Free Software zealots will be Wacoed, and this pathetic little movement will be just another memory on the road to a one world government where everybody's computers will all run a common operating system. All in the name of peace and understanding, of course. Conform, or face the consequences - the smart ones will learn and embrace the chosen computer system now. Those who don't will end up living in unabomber shacks and muttering to themselves.
Now that it seems clear that, unless it be by the brute force of government, Microsoft et. al. aren't going away soon, it has become more interesting to wonder, "Maybe we're the ones who are doomed! What if we lose?"
Will we win or lose? That's the big question. Perhaps when, after a bit, it becomes evident that Free Software isn't going away soon either, it will become more fashionable to consider the answer, "no".
No, we won't win and no, we won't lose. In fact, we were probably right in the first place; we can't lose. That just doesn't imply that we can win. It's possible (though, to be honest, not certain) that we're moving towards a balance of power between mutual, vigorous antagonists.
If this is so, than the 5% gain in MS's webserver market share at the expense of Apache is indeed overdue. It's quite like Linux moving into the OS market... the first gains are the easiest. Complete dominance is very hard to maintain. But that's not necessarily a dark omen for Apache, or even a sign that Apache's not doing all it should. In a situation where there is more than one viable (I certainly won't say high-quality) alternative, different people will make different choices.
Even if this is so, of course, it's not a call for complacency. Has Apache dropped the ball?
The author complains that Apache is merely a webserver, and that it doesn't take on the additional roles that IIS does? To the extent that the Free Software community is a Unix community (and this happens to be a pretty large extent) we must wonder whether we want apache to take on other roles. Apache "does one thing, and does it well"... very well. In fact, it's outstanding. So good that it makes me, for one, rather nervous to hear folks talk about fixing it.
Why would we choose to fold web applications into Apache? Offhand, I can think of two reasons: simplicity for the user, and speed. Simplicity shouldn't be discounted... sure, people running serious websites should aspire to great skill with their craft, but many don't, and we know that. But simplicity for users at the expense of vastly increased complexity for developers is a dangerous road. The Unix world has prospered (to an arguable extent) by avoiding it. Likewise speed. First and foremost, in order to develop good software, you have to be able to understand it. Code which pushes the limits of human cognition usually turns out to be bad.
The divide between modular tools and monolithic ones is one of the reasons we have diversity... some people will choose one type, others the other. Maybe the Free Software community should make both, but it's not likely to happen. You don't see many people clamoring to write a GPL'd Window/Mac-type OS, after all.
But back to the article... I must say, I liked the World War II metaphor on several levels. The very same strategy is being used here to promote collectivism and a monolithic power structure... it's necessary. Sure, it's rotten, but if we don't do it, we'll lose.
Well, if we're going to unify everything into Apache we're going to have to pick a technology to go with... Prasad thinks this should be Java. It has "mindshare, maturity, and corporate respectability", so even though it's only free, not Free, we should rally around it.
On the other hand, if we're going to stick with a more modular approach... well, Java is just another scripting language, isn't it? It has its advocates and detractors, but it doesn't really serve a different role than Perl or Python or Ruby or numerous other languages competing in that niche. Except, of course, that it can be used to create applets... but that's no longer what Java's about, we're told.
In short, I don't see it. Maybe we need to push harder into the web applications arena, but in my mind that means pushing further down the path that projects like Zope are already on... more apps you run with Apache, and with each other.
As for Stalin... well, he was an evil son of a bitch whose only real virtue over Hitler was that he was willing to fight on the Allied side. We probably did need his help. We didn't have to hand over Eastern Europe.
Sun isn't that bad, but neither should we hand the web over to them. Making Java Free is today's battle. Keeping the web Free does not require a unified front with 100% marketshare. In fact, freedom pretty well precludes such; diversity is the inevitable mark of an open society.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
- Webservices are simply RPC via XML over HTTP which can be implemented in any language with a sockets library and on any platform with a web server.
- The predominant web services protocols and standards are open and are in fact W3C recommendations or are soon going to be including XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.
Whenever I read articles like the one referenced in the above post I can't help but feel that people like screaming like Chicken Little simply to hear the sound of their own voices. The fact of the matter is that the goal of web services has always been for interoperability between platforms and languages hence the use of XML and HTTP, heck even Microsoft's Hailstorm claims to be language and platform agnostic with regards to accessing its web services.Repeat after me, all you need to do web services is a web server and a programming language with a socket library and strings support (i.e. almost all of them). Everything else is syntactic sugar and icing on the cake to maximize developer productivity the same way VB and ASP are supposed to versus C++ and Perl CGI.
I don't like the way he writes though. It's all scare mongering. Any article that mentions Hitler/Third Reich and isn't about WWII, is just designed to stab fear into the readers heart and sway them to the writers point of view. Nobody wants to be known as the one who sides with the Hitler of the internet
So it's like some sort of macho thing then? Only REAL MEN(tm) edit config files!!!
Granted, Apache is great. But the big picture is not whether or not Apache will lose the battle for the web, but whether or not Open Source will lose the battle for the web. I think that we can honestly say that if past experience is any indicator, then no, Open Source will not lose the battle for the web.
There are still plenty of businesses who want to have something on the web, although many of them don't know what. Either it's a "corporate presence" or actually putting a useful application on the web...whatever. All they know is they want it. Many of those businesses are cash-strapped (especially in times that are supposed to be poor, like now), and they don't have the vision to consider all the costs of a web-based project. They only see the cost of the software, hardware and either salary of who they have to hire/contract to get it done or the training budget to teach someone in house. Based on those factors alone Open Source in general (and Apache + PHP in particular) win. But, even if those poor saps in the IT department are called upon to actually give reasons besides money to go with Open Source, they can point out that there are many, many existing deployments of Open Source web servers that are happily humming along handling gobs of traffic without the susceptibility to attacks that Windows NT and 2k are normally susceptible to. Pair that with the overwhelming support of the Open Source community and you've got yourself a viable product.
But hang on, Virginia, it really isn't that simple. Microsoft is a really huge company (duh) and they've got clout in name if nothing else. Plus, IIS is ain't a half bad server and Active Server Pages really are easy to implement. Web services could make the server software more or less irrelevant, so Open Source could be on the ropes, right? WRONG! We, as the developers who are responsible for presenting all the options to our superiors, continually appeal to their desire for profit and remind them that there are alternatives to the pricey software packages they have been limited to knowing about.
If human nature is still what I think it is, the price alone will make the bean-counters salivate. The stability, proven performance and community support will make the IT managers grin. And a goddamned working product will make the customers/clients happy. Open Source may have to simply find itself a comfortable niche as the alternative to budget-busting name-brand software, but it most certainly not lose the battle for the web.
Good night.
My sigs always suck.
Any questions? In case two-syllable words are too big for you to understand, moron == dumb.
Blather. No further comment is necessary. This guy has his head up a blather hole.
Why are we pretending that the "web" is a "market"? Does it really matter which web browser has the greater "market" share? No one is making money on the web right now (serious money). Apache is not losing money to IIS.
Haha. Reminds me of that "product" called Linux. Come to think of it, I believe Apache's biggest market is that "product" called Linux. Tweak, tweak, tweak.
Do tell me, since when has Apache brought in a marketting staff? I'm just curious. Their web page says "non-profit." I'm assuming that must be part of their "marketting strategy" also. Sorta like FUD.
Yes. I wonder why Open Source (TM) can't create such simple stuff. I mean, even Microsoft is taking years to create this "simple concept." I've been hearing about this "simple concept" since, oh, what was it, 1995 or 96. Erm. maybe not. I believe those were the years of plug-ins and VRML. Wonder when they will finally deliver my 3D web. I've been waiting for years!
Oh yes! Hitler = Evil, Bill Gates = Hitler, Bill Gates = Evil. Let us please stop equating Bill Gates with evil. This is bullshit jealousy. He stole our web, waa waa! He stole our desktop, waa waa! Grow up. He made money legit, yes legit. It may be considered "hardball," but it was legit. He never went around killing people. This is sad coming from Linux camp. What makes this worse is it is coming from a news source that is representing Linux (and on top of that free software).
Why doesn't the author get off his lazy ass and code. The beauty of free software is anyone can contribute to make it better. If he wants Apache to go towards web services then he, himself, should be the one to throw some cash on the table or get busy coding.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
The web as we know it is alive and well with gpl code(and apache's license); (What R U smoking man?) go get some slashcode and start your own opencode is dead site!
Seriousley though, the future of the web lies in Freenet. Thier XML-RPC sounds like standards for future information flows. If all goes according to plan, kaffe will be humming on my webpad.
And, why is a GUI necessary for configuration of a web server. It's already (finally) becoming clear that server administrators need to know how to do more than just aim their mouse and click. Right. I hear this same tired argument over and over in the free software community: we CLI users are smarter than those drooling GUI users. Yeah, and my dick is bigger than yours too. It's time to set the record straight: some of the stupidest people I met in this world are command line junkies. You know the ones that will write an entire application in assembler (not just a tight inner loop), who write programming tool after programming tool but never write anything practical using them, who think vi and emacs (despite their heavy learning curve) are more productive than W2K's notepad.exe, and who constantly write their own widget sets (because of course it runs faster/better/less memory than the others). Now what we probably won't ever see is something like web server capable of automatically updating itself in the case of a virus outbreak. I know you CLIers don't like any of that sort of automation stuff because you'd rather subscribe to all the security lists, forward all the messages to your beeper, and whenever it goes off, type in a bunch of commands and rewrite perl scripts all night long. The rest of us GUI users will make a few button clicks and save our companies money and ourselves headaches.
you fools will realize you should never going around proclaiming Microsoft is going to die like that stupid fat bastard ESR and his pathetic followers did.
Netscape, Sun, Oracle, and hoardes of others said they were going to beat Microsoft and all they really did was just awake the sleeping giant. Of the companies listed *maybe* Oracle still has a future.
And all this time I thought Apache was Open Source and could run on BSD or even, gasp, Windows. Why tie it to Linux?
When I hear stuff like that, I think, "Uh oh, here come the consultants". I've been there: and believe me, the emperor has no clothes. This stuff is just what the term "FUD" was invented for. When someone quotes "enterprise component architecture" at me, and then adds "WSDL"and "UDDI", and then throws in a measure as Java jargon as the solution, I think: "there's no there there". Usually, this means the person saying this wants me to pay him a lot of money because he is so much smarter than I am.
We have OK clustering and failover solutions today. If anything is an obstacle there it is open source databases, not server/service platforms. WDSL? UDDI? Must it be those acronyms or will others do? I would like to hear what the real missing functionality is. A GUI and a few acronyms du jour buy me very little.
So web services are the next big thing? Maybe. But we thought the same about thin clients 5 years ago, or B2C's two years ago, or B2B's just last year. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Give me choice between an acronym consultant or a competent PHP programmer, and I will tell you who makes the biggest and fastest difference to my business's bottom line. And that counts nowadays. (Hint: it's not the consultant.)
That, and the obvious Java bias of the author, and his Sun links, makes me doubt the article even more. I put this one down as "In spite of his bias he may have a point but if so, I'd like to hear that point, not just hype.
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
First and foremost, the USA wants to control all software development, to some extent.
Microsoft is a US company. Several sectors of the USA entity, whether corporate, military or economic, want to have a certain level of control over the web, and other compute schemas.
Having Eastern European, Chinese and Indian/Pakistani Engineers holding the reins of software development in the near future is a most unappealing scenario to these sectors.
This is not to say they won't USE these emerging overseas assets, they just want to control them under the terms the USA sets. Open Source is giving up control -- a big no-no to the control freaks.
What we are seeing is a race -- all three branches of the US government are watching, are keeping their distance -- look how slow and predictable the "Microsoft Trial" has been -- really little more than a dog and pony show.
Second, Microsoft has on-the-spot management. While the open source people argue about KDE and Gnome, Reiser and XFS, for weeks at a time, MS comes up with object hierarchies and deploys them to 90% of the world's desktops. Open source is only a few percent of what the public see -- if you control the desktop, you will eventually control the back office and pipe.
Third, corruption. Plain and simple, a lot of powerful people made a bundle on MS and would like to keep that ball rolling. Thus, throughout the US government and civil service, there is a wave of "get rid of Unix for Microsoft". They say there is simply no option, although modern Linuces are pretty easy to install and use.
Fourth, deprofessionalisation. People want to plug a new computer into their net and have it run. They don't want to pay someone $75K a year to run around fixing them. The "suits" I deal with, plain and simple, think MS will lead them to a mantainence-free office long before Open Source ever will.
So, what is the fix? Like we saw on Linux Today, Java is a great platform. There are independent implementations getting strong and going online.
This alone is not enough, however. To beat MS, a few things MUST happen:
1) They must lose market share. In the USA the only way this will happen is via the law. The conviction must be upheld, and stringent controls applied -- like the opening of Exchange, permission for vendors to add a dual boot partition and modify the screen, restrictions on bundling, and a legal requirement for all state and federal computers to move to 2/3 non-MS platform or OS within 10 years.
2) A longer term solution will be China, India, Eastern Europe taking over software. This may take 50 years or more, so I will be dead before it happens. I'd prefer scenario one.
3) Somehow, Computer people need to stop looking at software and administration as a "cash cow". The customer wants smaller, faster, cheaper. What are we doing to give them a "plug-n-play" network? Even though it may cost us our jobs? These people have a bottom line, and it's time for programmers and admins to stop being so greedy.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Why in hell is everyone and every company against Microsoft?! Who cares if only MSN appears on the desktop? It's Microsoft's OS, so why should they have to include stuff from other companies? If AOL and friends want their junk on people's desktop, why don't they write their own OS?! Microsoft worked for a damn long time on their's, no shit little half-assed newcomers can't beat them!
They switched because they had begun to look beyond web servers to web services. Right under the collective nose of the Open Source community, the battleground has shifted. People need vanilla webservers today like they need Rolodexes in an age of digital organisers.
:)
Uhm Ok. So it's a good thing that IIS is a ftpd, telnetd and httpd? Whatever happened to using the right tools for the right job? Or has people become lazy now and want a all-in-one package? I use Apache for my httpd, ProFTPd for my ftpd, and OpenSSH for my sshd. Oh wait, IIS cannot do SSH can it? I now must download a program to handle any sshd I need, seeing I no longer use telnetd on my Linux box. So it's better to have one bloated piece of software handling most of my daemons, then having one lightwight program per daemon?
That is SO kEwL. I guess I shall buy Win2000 Adv. Server and install IIS by default and download the CR patch and reboot, then if that's not enough, download a 200 meg Service Pack to fix some of the 60K bugs in it. Tell me WHY this is a GOOD idea?
That is the one good thing I like about *NIX in general, I rarely need to reboot for anything.
Jack of all trades, master of none. -- the new slogan Redmond Inc. should use for IIS.
Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.
that the change in IIS vs. Apache only happened in month? Look at the market share at netcraft here, you'll see that the sharp decline only happened in the past month. It's just an an exception, like what happened in November 2000.
I really don't think there's going to be any one winner in this battle. Some people are going to gravitate towards .NET; some will stick with Apache/PHP/Perl/MySQL/etc and will get excellent results with it.
.DLL and soon replaced. The second company were hot-shots who thought they knew everything and ran themselves quickly into the ground. (Second company switched to Linux.)
.NET; go with what you know. But if .NET has stuff that is genuinely appealing and useful to you, then learn about it and make good use of it.
Most of the time this stuff is dictated by the existing conditions of the company (or the prior experience of the employees). I know of two companies, both of which used Windows, for their web services. The first company had people who actually knew what they were doing; they had no problems more major than a memory leak that was traced to a bad
All this proves, to me, is that the companies that thrive will be the ones with competent people at the helm, no matter what the OS in their servers. Apache works for you? Great! Don't bother with
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
If it took five Windows2000/IIS servers to do the same work as one Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP, is that really a net loss of market share when it goes from Linux to Windows, or is that just yet another system for the black hats to go carding at?
I give a rats (_o_) about what OS I run, I really just want to
Get the job done
for low bucks
secure
available
When it takes 5 pretty good servers on one OS to do the work of 1 low end server, gee, do you really think I would want to change?
Oh, the change from 1 Linux to 5 2000's was driven by a boss that thought because the tech's didn't use a GUI, it must be old, bad, no good software.
Sure, point and click to your ignorant pea brained content, jerk. But I'm not bitter.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
No, it's more like a competence thing. Only PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING(tm) edit config files...
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
... and Microsoft went up was because of all the newly added IPs to the Netcraft database from all those Code Red-infected machines advertising themselves!
It doesn't say why at their web site, it just said that it was discontinued.
I have two jobs to fill
1) short hours, high pay, fixing strippers G-strings.
2) Long hours, low pay, fixing urinals in strip clubs.
I bet there will be a lot of openings for job #2, making it look like that's where the future is.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
August's Netcraft survey has been released. Apache shows a smidgen of a decrease due to some hosting company finally completing conversion of a couple of sites to different software.
So who was right when last month I said that the trend wouldn't continue unless there were a couple thousand more sites left to convert? Was it me or that sold-out journalist?
What happened when an acorn fell on Chicken Little's head? She ran off to the King to tell him the sky was falling.
So an acorn fell on Apache's head. Are you going to run off to tell the CEO the sky is falling as well?