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

Configuration

[ViceClown]

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.

Re:Configuration

[tshak]

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.

It all depends. I'd say that for most situtions you are right - IIS is not only easier to set up, but it is a very fast web server (dynamic content). Apache, however, _can_ be easier to setup when you want to "script" say 500 small static sites. httpd.conf is not that difficult to learn, nor is it that hard to create a Perl or shell script to automate it. On the flipside, writing VBScript via ADSI to script IIS sites is a huge PITA (and performance hog). If MS would just move IIS's config out of the metabase and into some XML config file, then I think your statement would be correct accross the board.

Re:Configuration

[ViceClown]

Ahhh... excellent points! Being a web developer (and a geeky one at that) I am not affraid of apache or http.conf. That said, I know that some other consultants I know that work in the IT field wouldn't know where to start. LOTS of IT folks with their summer training only know gui setup screens and dont' take kindly to conf files... to say nothing of compiling new modules into apache. Im not pooping on apache here... I like it and really appreciate it's security/stability. The majority of people using it, however, who are in IT so they can "have a job" don't want to deal with config files. Now Im rambling. Anyway - I appreciate the feedback!!

Re:Configuration

[spideyct]

With ASP.NET (which is a sort of "extension" to IIS 5.0/5.1 for running .aspx pages), you can configure MOST of the settings for ASP.NET pages using the XML web.config file.

But since it runs within IIS, you still have to use the IIS Manager for such tasks as creating a new application directory, changing the directory security settings, or setting the default document.

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...

Re:Configuration

[clifyt]

"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."

Well, yeah...IIS3 SUCKED. It had the worst interface ever. 4 wasn't bad. 5 actually got things right from a GUI POV. Every version only has gotten better.

Hell, if it weren't for M$'s practices of blaming sysadmin for their mistakes (and with an organization as big as M$, its to be expected...holes are actually easier to accidently be left in because so many developers have their hands in the pie) and the fact that I can serve almost 3x as much dynamic content from the equally equiped Linux box (IIS still can server more static text...but who the hell uses static text these days???) is why I moved over Apache for most of my stuff.

Right now, I use a mixture of servers and finally started converting my code to PHP and JSP from ASP (and a few other 3 letter acronyms) and finding these aren't nearly as bad as the 'professional' web developers will tell ya. Not as many visual tools to work with in the programming (ie., no PHP for Dreamweaver...ok there IS an extention, but it isn't nearly as fleshed out as the ASP and I still find it faster to do database stuff by hand).

So, if I had dedicated IIS Admin, more hardware that I didn't have to service and lots of licenses, I'd probably go with M$'s contribution...its much easier to find a monkey that can fix a M$ problem than a Linux / Apache problem. But as I know how all this stuff works and I don't have all the above, I'll probably keep converting my old boxes over to Linux as they retire from their windows duties (and get more performance they did in the previous years to boot :)

clif

Re:Configuration

[Hunsvotti]

This is one of the reasons why I rail against my company hiring consultants. If our experiences are a good metric, then I'd have to assume that most consultants are mega-'tards.

Whenever we have hired consultants, they have given us products that range from mediocre to absolute crap. They have also been generally disinterested in providing after-hours support, even though they are paid for it. (Why should they be troubled at 3AM to fix something they wrote that's costing $5,000 for every minute it's broken? They're consultants. The company can do well or fail; it's no skin off their backs.)

Then, when they're long-gone, in-house types like me get a hold of their source code, SQL schema, etc. The source code is invariably coded in a style reminiscent of GW-BASIC (which, for those of you who don't know, is one of those crusty old BASIC interpreters from the mid-to-late '80s that make you use line numbers and have GOSUBs instead of functions): ultra-rigid structure, little to zero code re-use within the application, sloppy functions (if there even ARE functions), spaghetti-like style, etc. I recently looked at some utter crap left behind by a consultant. When I asked about it, I was told that someone had gone through a business requirements document with the consultant PARAGRAPH BY PARAGRAPH and just sort of threw together a hodgepodge of crap to handle it, rather than sitting down and actually thinking about how it should be programmed.

Oh yeah. The entire source listing was written with caps lock on, as was the SQL schema. BHRLHBLHRLHBLHGLHLGHRLHB!@@#@#$

So when I hear that consultants and other jerkoffs are allergic to text editors, it does not surprise me. OUGH NO!!! I HAVE TO COMPILE THE KERNEL OR APACHE!!! I'LL NEED YOU TO SIGN OFF ON THIS $5,000 .00 CLASS IN HAWAII PLEASE!!!

Folks, if a total greenhorn (like I was a few years ago) can read a couple documents, figure out where httpd.conf lives, and tweak it (which any MORON could do, as heavily commented as it is), there is NO excuse for a so-called professional to shy away from it.

I will never - NEVER - be able to fully respect any system administrator, developer, or other technical-type IT worker who is not at least semi-proficient in some variety of UNIX (and by that I mean BSD as well as the SysV-based stuff like Linux and Solaris). It demonstrates lack of initiative and gullibility to Microsoft marketdroid drivel. In fact, if Microsoft didn't have world-class marketdroids, I probably wouldn't even be writing this paragraph. If you want to become an MCSE, more power to you, but UNIX aversion in someone who's supposed to be an IT professional strikes me the same way as a timid driver doing 15MPH up the onramp to the freeway.

Demise of IIS?

[damieng]

Give me a break.

It's well integrated into Windows and it's still running many many sites using ASP (the equivalent of PHP).

With ASP.Net we may even see it start to compete against more powerful web development environment such as Java Server Pages (JSP) and Apple's WebObjects.

Having worked with both...

[AltGrendel]

...I actually find IIS easier to work with. I don't like this fact at all. I'm hoping Apache 2.0 does knock IIS's sock.c off.

Re:Having worked with both...

[DavidJA]

Try having the web server go down DAILY. This is an e-commerce site we're talking about here

Did anyone ever TRY to fix it? I mean you obviously know that there are MANY IIS implimentations running out there without going down daily.

Maybe it was running some dodgie ASP script (do until rs.eof; rs.loop; [without the rs.movenext]) will obviously make IIS crack the shits by putting it in an endless loop.

Anyway, point being, /. seems to be full of incompatent systems administrators; If I was running the site, it would NOT be going down every day. I would work day and night until I had a fix. Did you ever try MS support; I've used them for problems before, and they are execellent.

...and don't give me that crap about having to PAY for support, its an e-commerce site for god's sake!

Re:Having worked with both...

[DrSkwid]

or use micorosft telnet

end then when you get there realise that there aren't any text editors installed you can use so it's

copy con > file.txt

and hoping you don't typo!

And there you are sat at your friends house and you've got to install software just get in which you've got to convinve him to do

nope, gimme a computer I can control with a 9600baud gsm phone on a train or out skiing

that'll be that there unix stuff

oh and while you're there back your web server up without stopping the service

including the server side active X controls

oh, darn, you can't, you've got to reboot to unload them from memory so the kernel will unlock their disk image. How long does it take to come back up? 5 maybe 10 minutes, 20 even for a well used Exchange Server. oops forgot to set that service auto start, doh now it says something's changed and i need to reboot again.

lovely on a 14.4 modem in a hotel room at $5 a minute

I'm so glad I left all that behind.

Uhhhhhh

[Bedouin X]

"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. And, here, Microsoft has seemingly acknowledged defeat: IIS is not available on the Home edition of XP and the Professional edition, by default, is installed without IIS.

Officials from Microsoft declined to comment on this article."

What a crock of crap. As an IIS Admin I will not sit here and act like IIS is perfect (it is a royal pain in the arse actually), but this is just clueless reporting(?). IIS has NEVER been installed by default in ANY version of NT or 2000 Workstation, Professional, etc. I know that it wasn't installed by default in NT4 Server as well. I honestly can't remember with 2000 Server. Such drivel like this really throws lots of salt in the article. If I were Microsoft, I wouldn't give this writer any air of legitimacy by responding either.

Re:Uhhhhhh

[Kidbro]

In fact if you look at the NT 4.0 Workstation and W2K Pro licenses you'll see that it's against the license to run a web server on them (can't exceed 10 concurrent IP connections).

Are you suggesting that the NT 4 IIS could handle more than 10 simultaneous requests?

Sorry, had to bite on such an obvious bait =)

MS has not given up on IIS

[Utopia]

It is incorrect to say MS has given up on IIS. XP Pro/Home are not meant to serve Web content they are meant for business or home users respectively.

The next server version of windows (Windows .Net) will come in four different versions
Windows .NET Web Server - for Web serving and hosting
Windows .NET Standard Server - for file and printer sharing etc.
Windows .NET Enterprise Server - for applications services, Web services
Windows .NET Datacenter Server
Had MS given up on IIS they would have a seperate Windows .NET Web Server

Apache AND IIS are good..

[itsnotme]

You have to admit that both IIS and Apache are both good webservers, its just that IIS gets a lot of flak for having holes in it that admins were not quick to patch, but at the same time Microsoft wasnt too quick on telling admins to patch it OR published it that broadly.. BUT IIS to some people is easier to use, so hence the easiness facto makes it attractive to a lot of people..

Apache on the other hand is also a good webserver, its been tested pretty throughly and doesnt seem to have that many holes, ( I cant say it does or doesnt because I havent looked ) but its also pretty intuitive to use for people that use Unix, so until the Unix population grows bigger than the windows population, IIS is going to be a tad more popular among that crowd..

I applaud microsoft for moving it out of the mainstream windows, it creates less of a hole to fix, and it decreases the risk of having another CodeRed type of thing happen again where users dont know that their computer is doing something.. but yeah, microsoft is tryign to make more money off it too.. this shouldnt surprise anybody

It's part of .NET

[johnburton]

And although .NET is much more than web services, they are a fairly important part of the whole system and IIS is a critical part of providing those web services so I would certainly expect microsoft to continue working on IIS.

And also apache is nice in many ways, but if you just want to put up a couple files on an intranet or something, it's so easy just to right click on the directory and choose "Web Sharing" to create a virtual IIS web directory that it certainly has it's place.

WebDav support

[tjansen]

A missing piece in the acticle is the importance of Apache 2.0 for WebDAV. WebDAV is a HTTP-extension making the HTTP-server a real fileserver - Apache 2.0 comes with full WebDAV support. As WebDAV is quite flexible and allows stuff like meta-data, versioning and different authentication mechanisms (that are unfortunately not finalized yet) it is a possible successor for both NFS and SMB/Cifs.
WindowsXP supports the mounting of WebDAV shares, as does Linux with the help of the DAV filesystem driver. And Apache could be the standard fileserver... scary.

Microsoft ditching IIS? Not likely...

[MalusCaelestis]

Microsoft will not be ditching IIS. It is not an option in Windows XP Home because the average XP Home user isn't creating database-driven Web sites in ASP or Perl/CGI (you'd be lucky to find an XP Home user that knows HTML, I'd wager). Further, IIS is not a pre-installed option in Windows 2000 Professional, so why should it be in Windows XP Professional? Most XP Professional users are not Web developers (though many Web developers are XP Professional users) that don't need IIS installed on their system.

I suppose anti-Microsoft fanatics will also say that IIS on XP Professional being limited to 10 concurrent connections is further proof that Microsoft is dropping IIS. (Windows 2000 Professional is also limited to 10 concurrent connections.) But really this is just a way for Microsoft to ensure that people buy their more expensive Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (and their forthcoming Windows.NET Server and Windows.NET Advanced Server).

Just because something isn't included in the Home version and isn't installed (by default) in the Workstation version of a product doesn't mean it is being dropped.

Anyone who argues that Microsoft is giving up their fight to be dominant in the Web server market doesn't know anything about Microsoft strategy and obviously knows nothing about their .NET campaign.

Instead of focusing on the demise of IIS

[Pinball Wizard]

as this article seemed to do(which is ludicrous, as many comments have already pointed out), why not play up the strengths of Apache?

If Apache 2.0 really works as well under Windows as it does under Unix, that is a really great thing. Apache currently supports almost as many languages as .NET promises to, and furthermore, modules are compiled into the server, rather than being compiled to an intermediate language and served up from a virtual machine like the .NET server will do.

Apache is a winner because it is secure, scalable, fast and reliable. If it is all these things under Windows thats even better. I wish the article could have played up the strengths of Apache rather than serving up the pipe dream that Microsoft is ditching IIS.

IIS isn't going anywhere

[RebornData]

MS has always been successful in the enterprise space by focusing on developers and putting together a platform that creates compelling value for business software developers. While it's true that MS is rarely best at anything, it's one of a small number of companies that provides a complete, supported server product line (OS, DB, app server, web server, message queueing, transaction coordination, etc...) and a development environment that is reasonably integrated across it. Enterprises see this as an advantage.

IIS is perceived to be "good enough" by many companies and organizations. The effort to find, learn, integrate, and get support for another slightly-better alternative just isn't worth it to them.

However, MS is taking a huge beating on the security issues, and if they loose that "good enough" image, there will be a crack for Apache to squeeze through. Don't count on it being there for long...

watch out...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Microsoft is going to come out with guns blazing and firing on all cylinders with IIS6.0, I'll bet. Remember, we are talking about a company that is uber-paranoid and run by relatively intelligent people. Apache is a threat right now. It is more stable and more secure than IIS and Apache runs on a wider variety of platforms. While I'm not sure that we'll see IIS running on UNIX anytime soon, you can bet your bottom dollar that in terms of stability and security IIS6.0 will be a major improvement over all previous versions. IIS7.0 will just move further in that direction.

Of course, my only justification for making this statement is that Microsoft values its survival and is not, contrary to popular belief, run by idiots. If

a) Microsoft's survival depends on its ability to sell its products;

b) IIS is a product that it wants to sell;

c) A competitor (Apache) offers something that appears to be highly demanded by the market;

d)IIS and Apache compete with each other;

e)By building the market-demanded functionality into its product Microsoft might sell more of its product and take market share away from its competitor; then

Microsoft will build that functionality into its product.

They've done it in the past with other products and even leveraged their status as a monopoly in order to swallow market share. It's good to see the developers of Apache continuing to improve their software because if they were to stop doing so, Microsoft would soon provide something as good or better. As a company, Microsoft is ferociously competitive.

Oh my God, this is just too funny!

[sheldon]

I love it!

"Microsoft has seemingly acknowledged defeat: IIS is not available on the Home edition of XP and the Professional edition, by default, is installed without IIS. "

Microsoft get's questioned as to why IIS would possibly be installed automatically, or why it would be installed on a machine whose user probably doesn't know what it is... So in an effort to offer a more secure platform they change the configuration in Windows XP. Home does not get IIS, and Pro only installs it by request.(Actually Win2k Pro only installed IIS by request as well, and WinMe didn't ship with IIS at all either, but whatever)

Now this guy claims it's because Microsoft is abandoning the market.

That has got to be the funniest thing I have read thus far this year. There are some equally stupid statements made elsewhere in the article, but it's really not worth the effort to point them out. :)

Article laden with errors.

[Jayde Stargunner]

I'm sorry...but the person who wrote this article is very mistaken about the nature of IIS and Windows as a whole.

First off, it's not in Home because...well...it's HOME EDITION. IIS is one of the major "features" in Professional compared to Home. You didn't see them putting IIS in WinME, did you? Didn't think so.

Second, I assume by "non-standard" he means that IIS isn't installed by default in WinXP Pro? Yeah. Time to wake up to the FUD that has perpetuated about the "default install" of IIS. Windows 2000, both Professional and Server, didn't install IIS by default either. IIS has been "optional" for almost 2 years now. Unfortunately, the general /. crowd has chosen to keep saying "IIS is installed by default" over and over during that time, basically in reference to NT 4 only--which, honestly, is a painfully old OS at this point in time.

I'm not going to claim that IIS has actually gained ground in the last few years, since I honestly can't be sure given all the conflicting reports. However, all MS's claimed increases have taken place without IIS installed by default on all current, shipping OS's. The fact that this will continue to be the case should have little to no bearing on their current position.

Now, a brand-new Apache coming out? That's news. Talk about that. There's really no need to toss in anti-MS propaganda at any possible opportunity because it just looks plain silly. (Although I'll probably be modded down for saying so.)

-Jayde

Re:Configuration and scripting

[n0-0p]

Hate to tell you this, but in NT/2K you can script essentially everything. It's pretty much always been that way. The problem is that NT admins rarely ever learn it because everything appears so GUI centric. The GUI interface is very approachable to the novice. In the long run, though, you can only go so far with the training wheels on and to properly administer an MS system/network you have to learn how the OS actually works. Unfortunately that's not covered by the MCSE requirements.
I spent 3 years as an NT admin and I can honestly state that I scripted any repetitious or large tasks I encountered. Of course most of the other admins I worked with, while fairly technically knowledgeable, seemed oblivious to the concept of scripting or programming in general. I'm not a fan of Microsoft (I don't like signing 12 NDA's to look at my OS's source) and NT/2K/XP do have some serious flaws. But it get's a bad rap for the wrong reason most of the time, and a lack of scripting support is not really one of it's failings.

Re:I like config files better

[purplemonkeydan]

IIS 6 (.Net Server) allows the metabase (where IIS keeps it's settings) to be stored in an XML file. You make a change to the XML file, it updates the metabase. You make a change to the metabase, it updates the XML file.

Very handy if you want to keep a standardised configuration backup.