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LAMP Grid Application Server, No More J2EE
An anonymous reader writes "Check out this blog entry in Loosely Coupled about ActiveGrid's new open source Grid Application Server based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. Not to start another PHP vs. Java flame war, but it looks like LAMP is starting to grow up, and that it is much better suited for next generation applications than J2EE."
Not to start another PHP vs. Java flame war, but it looks like LAMP is starting to grow up, and that it is much better suited for next generation applications than J2EE.
What the hell do you base that peice of tripe on? Why lets compare an incomplete system cobled together on top of PHP to a mature Java based solution which is currently being used in hundreds of thousands of enterprise sites daily throughout the world. Yeah, I can see how LAMP just kicks J2EE's ass on that one.
Seriously, overhype much?
Not provocative at all that. No. Not in the slightest.
I'm sure the flamewar that no doubt follows is merely a figment of our collective imaginations.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Not to start another PHP vs. Java flame war, but it looks like LAMP is starting to grow up, and that it is much better suited for next generation applications than J2EE."
Thats like me saying, "Not to offend you, but check out goatse.cx!"
ITS JUST NOT POSSIBLE TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS!
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
For the majority of enterprise projects I've worked on, we wouldn't event consider a platform that didn't perform Two Phase Commits (MySQL) nor supported distributed transactions. This stuff still has a long way to go before it's to be taken seriously.
Java is well suited for middle-ware too. You don't have to install a big heavy duty J2EE server and enterprise level DB server. Tomcat & MySQL does the job just fine for smaller operations.
Take a look at O'Reillys "Better, Faster, Lighter Java"
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bfljava/
IMHO Java scales very well, from small prototype projects right up to enterprise level apps. PHP is fine for the smaller stuff but I'd rather poke my eyes out with a white hot needle than develop and enterprise app with it.
"hehe, website" - Homer Simpson
...but doesn't it seem a little silly to base computational applications on what is essentially a glorified webserver? Sure, use LAMP for your shopping cart, but enterprise applications are more than just shopping carts.
.NET applications were never designed with grids in mind" - well, I can't speak for .NET, but J2EE is designed for clustering and distribution. Have you seen EJBs? EJBs are designed for interaction across computers.
"There is no impedance mismatch, everything talks SOAP/HTTP" - well, yes, that's great, but you shouldn't be talking SOAP/HTTP internally. There are faster means of communication, so use them.
"Apparently what is needed is a language/environment that is loosely typed in order to encapsulate XML well and that can efficiently process text" - only on input and output. In intermediary stages, you should be using a much more efficient format. If you're doing something clever, it's going to involve much more than just plain old text.
"J2EE and
RTFA and you'll see that LAMP is being pushed for "text-pumping". Why aren't they saying it's any good for anything else? Because it most likely isn't.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Substitute Postgres or whatever to taste, but that just fucks up a perfectly good acronym, so we'll pretend MySQL is a placeholder for $REAL_DATABASE of your choice.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Why does nobody use it? Fear, uncertainty and doubt. [...] People can't get over the parentheses. The boss won't approve it. Nobody else uses it, so it's hard to get support.
;-)
You know, I think those were all pretty valid reasons.
This month's meeting at my local Java user's group there was an impressive demo on Ruby on Rails. The presenter built a blogging application live in front of the group, literally in 10 minutes or so. Prior to this demo I had pretty much written Ruby off "just another alternative to perl or python" but I have to say that Rails looks really impressive, enough so that I'm taking a closer look at Ruby.
One of the guys in our user's group, Chris Nelson, is building a similar framework for Java - called Trails. He also built a blogging application live during the meeting. It took him a bit longer - perhaps 15-20 minutes. It was impressive as well, although I will say that for Trails you need to know a fair amount about Hibernate and Tapestry. Realize that he's been working on this only for a few months and suddenly you see that this work is very impressive too.
Anyone interested in developing web apps might want to check these projects out - very impressive stuff!
Who needs EJB when there's Hibernate http://www.hibernate.org/ and Spring http://www.springframework.org/. Persistence, Transaction Management, and SQL generation in one tidy package. And it works on any J2EE app server, no matter how lightweight or robust.
Not that I have qualms with any attempt to provide these services in PHP. It's not a matter of having just one tool in your toolbox, but rather knowing which tool is right for which job. My only response to the original poster is "I don't want to start a flamewar, but if you aren't a sound enough engineer to know when to use which tool, you pretty much suck."
For large scale projects, I use Java. It is great Object oriented language that I can use to the fullest extent. I can get very close to that MVC pattern that is soo useful in large-scale projects. I don't use EJBs -- not needed them yet. I use the JMS, WebServices, JSP/Servlets, etc. We connect to a real database (DB2). J2EE offers a completely different scale with work with. You can do everything from simple web applications to clustered app servers at several levels.
For smaller stuff, I like LAMP fairly well. It is simple and easy to get started, although not great for larger projects (code reuse, management, scaleability). MySQL, again, nice and fast for small stuff. I perfer PostgreSQL because of the power and flexibility. I'm trying to move more towards PostgreSQL especially after recent changes in licensing with MySQL. For these projects in general, I like PHP over Perl for webpages. Perl is still great for admin tools on the console or for confusing the heck out of folks not familiar with your code. PHP is simple and made for website based applications. Again, I'm not going down that path if I know it will grow into a huge project.
The deal is, they are tools. The both have their strengths and weaknesses. Evaluate your needs, and choose the best tool for the job. I use both and love both -- but choose wisely.
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