Apache 2.0 vs. IIS

TonyG writes: "According to an item on InternetNews, the impending release of Apache 2.0 could very well mean the demise of IIS. Interestingly, the article asserts that Microsoft have already given up on IIS, the proof being its absence in XP Home and its non-standard presence in XP Pro. Apache.Net? Sounds catchy..." That's a silly argument by the internetnews.com writer - IIS isn't in the Home edition because Microsoft wants to charge more for "server" operating systems, not because they're "admitting defeat". But it's a decent look at the upcoming Apache 2.0.

Comments

Apache 2.0 vs IIS

[MoceanWorker]

come on... a 5 year old would know the answer to this :-\

and article was wrong here too.

[Erris]

Let's have a look at that again: Microsoft's only downside exposure would be the potential demise of IIS, which has no financial impact because the Web server is bundled as part of the OS.

The finacial impact would be huge. Microsoft's desktop is inferior and free software continues to march ahead. Really, who does not feel like a veneralbe cripple on the M$ box they have to use at work? Microsoft's only hope for maintianing their monopoly is to extend it to the internet where their servers will then inconvienence all those who don't use M$IE. If this does not happen, Microsoft will be forced to, gasp, compete with free software's features.

Re:Configuration

[Cally]

Kudos for the apache team on 2.0 but until it's as easy to configure and add onto as IIS it will continue to be a battle with Microsoft.

Easy to configure?? Your'e kidding, right?

I first played with Apache (on NT4 in fact) at about the same time as I was given my first real live webserver to handle - which was IIS3, and soon afer, 4. Configuration of IIS is a nightmare compared to Apache. There are tons of things wher eyou have to painstakingly click up and down a complicated tree hierarchy with obscure generalist names like "web site" "host" "pubHTML" (IIRC, this was a few years ago now) and change them at multiple levels. This was especially true for getting CGI to run properly instead of sending back the source as text, or 500-ing, or whatever. Not at all intuitive. With Apache, there were IIRC a total of three things to type into a config file - plaintext, well commented, and pretty obvious what they should be. It took less an hour to get running even the first time I used it; and I wasn't at all used to editing text config files at the time.

From then on, as I used IIS to run Perl CGIs I'd mostly written & debugged at home on Apache, I grew more and more impressed with Apache. It's fast, flexible, incredibly stable (it's never ONCE crashed on me in production), secure (it was such fun tail -f ing the access log during CodeRed and nimda ...) and adding modules, of which there are tens of very powerful ones from HTTP proxies to authentication via databases, encryption, URL correction, you name it ) is usually just a matter of reading the docs for 10 mins, running configure, make, make install and adding a couple of lines to (the same) config file. Cos it's plain text I can do it in any editor I liked; when I started I was using Notepad and Programmers File Editor on Windows; now I use emacs , on Linux AND NT, but I could use Vi, or Microsoft Word, or whatever the hell else I wanted to .

Eventually I was fired for using Perl and Apache in production, instead of IIS. My successor was the guy who'd been doing the HTML and graphics for the content - a good chap and certainly capable of picking up at least as good Perl as I'd written (not very, at the time. But it worked, dammit! :) . He complained to me a few months later that after several very expensive courses, and a load of bloated expensive slow Visual InterDev / Vusal Studio guff installed on his machine, he'd started converting my Perl to ASP. IIS crashed all the time, not only on his dev machine but on the production server. He was secretly reading the Gecko on his own time and playing with a sly Apache install... :)

I wonder if any of the commenters in favour of IIS actually moved FROM apache to it. IN my experience the traffic is all one-way...