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Expriences with Open Source Web Technologies?
_ZorKa_ asks: "I have been asked to give a presentation at an up and coming technology expo by my employer about 'Open Source Web Technologies'. Having taught Linux courses and open source web languages at a local college I feel fairly comfortable in speaking on the subject in front of a large crowd. So, instead of giving some of the same old boring open source stories I normally use I thought I would poll the Slashdot audience and see if there is anything of particular interest I should mention during my presentation. Maybe you have a war story to tell, or some advice to give. Anyone have any great stories that I could pass on as to why you *should* use open source web technologies in a business? Anyone have any links to some sound numbers that can back an argument up with. Even if you have reasons why a business shouldn't use open source web technologies I would like to consider those as well. I'm all ears!"
Without getting into whether or not this is a good thing, large businesses want to use what everybody else is using. It is generally assumed that everybody is using Microsoft. You should correct this misconception by citing the netcraft survey.
Please do mention that while the more prevalent free server-side web technologies are scripting languages designed for people with a Unix/C programming background, they aren't the only options. My Beautiful Report Language is easy to pick up for anyone who knows HTML and SQL. The syntax is conceptually similar to HTML/XML, but less verbose and easy to visually distinguish from markup.
This company organized a huge media-related event, and they wanted to have an on-line registration system. Initially they called in a team which developed the system on Windows NT servers, with ASP and SQL Server. They took 3 months and when they finally delivered the system, it simply crashed under the heavy load.
That's when they called us in. This was 2 days prior to the registration day, so we were in a big rush. We, of course, advocated open/free technologies; we suggested Linux, MySQL, apache and perl. They said OK, so we started working. At the same time, the NT team worked on their server, tweaking it to see if they could withstand the load.
30 hours later, and on a server that was about 1/2 the capacity of the NT team's server, our system went on-line. It turns out it, too, crashed under the load. Heh. But while the NT team was busy rebooting their server just once, we installed Linux on 4 additional computers (desk-grade IBM Aptivas) and ended up with a round-robin configuration, with 4 web servers and a backend database server. Our system handled the load so well, that this time the company' firewall crashed and they had to update it.
I still like to use it as an example of how free technologies and tools enabled us to re-engineer 3 months worth of work from the NT team, in about 36 hours.