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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.
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).
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.
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?
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...
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.
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 &
-consistent user interface
You should examine OSX from Apple.
-let's get some good fonts
OSX: Some of the most beautiful fonts I have ever seen. The font sizing tool is pretty cool as well.
-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.
Some weird stuff in Aqua, but overall nice. Also Apple listens to their market and are making requested changes and options available in OSX.
-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...
Darwin....
-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.
Whoa dude. I suppose S. Jobs qualifies here, but I am not sure if I want him making all of the decisions. Lets say Apple as a whole. The do have some pretty smart folks there. Especially after the purchase of NeXT.
-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.
OSX.
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...
Very painful...
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I would like to see the netcraft study after all of the unintentional IIS sites are shut down because of CodeRed.
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.
"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
The authors main argument wasn't the slight drop in Apache market share, it was the real fact that in the future, a simple web server will not be enough. Rather, a web services platform is what is needed. He feels that simply copying Microsofts strategy is no good (Mono, dotGnu)....it is actually making us look stupid: why would the Unix community need to learn from M$ how to make Servers. Traditionally the roles have been somewhat reversed. I agree with the Author that the Open Source community has no choice but to embrace Java. At least that way we will not simply be a M$ copycat.
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 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 )
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/
>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.
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.
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
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?
While it's certainly scary that IIS is enabled by default, when one considers the recent (and not so recent) problems it's had, the fact remains that Apache is also enabled, by default, in quite a few Linux distributions. So I don't know if this is a very strong against the survey.
- James
I remember hearing a month or so ago about a huge virtual host with several hundred THOUSAND websites being hosted switched from Apache to IIS, and this was almost completely responsible for the Netcraft changes. Anyone remember anything about this?
I think the author has bought into the "Web Services!" hype and seriously over-estimates the problems in creating them.
Actually, Apache already has an XML "Web Service" framework in place - Cocoon. It seems to be pushed more as an HTML content server, but it can serve up XML just as easily.
This is more true than many people realize. I am in the process of deploying a web app for my company and am using Tomcat to serve it. The way the very MS oriented networking guys are reacting to having to read docs and edit config files is amazing. You would think I had asked them to crawl through glass and modify the configs with their own blood. You can SEE what is going through there minds, "Where's the SETUP.EXE I click on? Where are the checkboxes and Next/Finish buttons? Why can't I just fake it for now and worry about the details later if/when it breaks?!"
:) Oh, and KOL had better be able to run AOL too heh... Oh my!! BETTER PLAN!!! Get AOL to distribute a copy of KOL on their CD's (in return for an AOL icon on the desktop)! Automatically convert their 'office' files to StarOffice... World domination is within our grasp folks!!!!
To make learning how things work optional is obviously an MS goal. And a strategy that is guaranteed to succeed due to the average persons desire to gain maximal slack. I'll restate the obvious yet again by saying that Linux/Apache/otherbestOSS are doomed to marginal levels (IOW - Apache's share will continue to decline) of usage by the world at large, due purely to human laziness. UNLESS and until an easy-to-use and _knowledge-optional_ Linux/Apache/whatever comes out. We're talking pablum-dripping-fuzzy-bear-and-talking-flower easy here.
I kind of like the sound of it though. Knowledge-Optional Linux - The KO punch to MS!
All joking aside, (s)he who implemented KO Linux/Apache/whatever and it's ultra-anti-1337 interface would in fact be the most 1337 of them all...and likely have a nice FAT bank account out of the deal too.
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I'll let you in on a little secret..
Once upon a time there was a wise old (okay, he was pretty young) man named Linus. One day, he created this thing called "Linux." Many moons later, and after many people followed his trail, he uttered some words jokingly. Those words were something to the effect of "Linux will strive towards World Domination." A little news site, called Slashdot, was running at the time. They posted the word of Linus. People far and wide took notice and took his words literally. For the people of Linux hated the empire known as Microsoft. They saw Linux as a way to bring them freedom from the empire. They weren't too keen on the points of GNU's idea called "free software," but they did realize they would not have to pay the Microsoft tax anymore.
And here we are today. In a battle of words with no action. The free software coders for the most part do not care about Microsoft's market share. And some *gasp* actually want the freedom provided from free software.
Honestly, I would simply _love_ it if we could all go back to 1996 or 97. The community was thriving, but not being hyped. There was no news site (except maybe Slashdot.. can't recall the exact time period). Now it is too crowded, it seems. Freshmeat used to be a place where quality software could be found (not the landfill of use-once-and-throwaway perl scripts it is today). Today I suppose we have Advagato (Kuro5hin isn't exactly 100% technology forum, but it's nice). It's just not the same anymore. Will people continue writing free software knowing people are making money off of it? If I knew big corporations were making money off Apache (and I coded for Apache) I'd be asking questions. If IIS is selling, is my time worthless? Could I be making money coding on proprietary? Serious questions need answering.
Dijkstra Considered Dead