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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.
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.
Now I know why Windows installs IIS by default! They want higher Netcraft-ratings! ;-)
I doubt, therefore I may be.
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.
We keep the porn sites, you keep all the dot-com startup. There, end of the battle.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
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!
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."
What?!? There's a windows that doesn't suck?
Why didn't I hear about this? I'm always the last to know...
"as bad."
...
which is my bad, sorry
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
A couple of women were playing golf one sunny Saturday morning. The first of the twosome teed off and watched in horror as her ball headed directly toward a foursome of men playing the next hole.
The ball hit one of the men, and he immediately clasped his hands together at his groin, fell to the ground and proceeded to roll around in evident agony.
The woman rushed down to the man and immediately began to apologize. "Please allow me to help. I'm a physical therapist and I know I could relieve your pain if you'd allow me," she told him earnestly.
"Ummph, oooh, nnooo, I'll be alright. I'll be fine in a few minutes," he replied breathlessly as he remained in the fetal position still clasping his hands together in his groin.
But she persisted, and he finally allowed her to help him. She gently took his hands away and laid them to the side, she loosened his pants, and she put her hands inside. She began to massage him. She then asked him "How does that feel?"
He replied "It feels great, but my thumb still hurts like hell."
Exactly. Why do people think you need something huge and fancy to do web services? The whole point of it is to simplify things. I wrote our order entry system at work using EJB, and I exposed the beans via SOAP by 1) copying Apache's soap.jar to Tomcat's webapp directory and 2) writing a 7-line deployment descriptor. Two steps, that's it. And for any other new web services, I don't even need to repeat the first step. This is all running on open-source software (Linux, JBoss, Hypersonic, Tomcat, Apache SOAP). How exactly is open source behind MS on this one? I can do it all in production-level software today with open source; I have to use a beta-level app from MS to do it in the IIS world. I just don't understand this article at all.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.