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eBay Chooses Debian for Wireless Servers
molo writes "According to Nils Lohner of the Debian press team, eBay and Workspot have chosen Debian with Apache and Perl for their wireless servers. Workspot also explains their reasons and their setup. "
Gotta love those snazzy PowerPoint presentations.
In some countries now you can pay for things using wireless technology. Usually a PCS phone or something: a note comes up asking whether you accept a charge, you say yes or not, and it appears on your next phonebill.
Some places let you buy stuff from vending machines, and you can order pizzas, pay for stuff in stores... merchants just assume that everyone has some kind of intelligent wireless device.
This stuff is going to reach a critical mass soon, and it's going to be big. It's great to see that Linux/Debian/GNU is breaking ground here--it's the way of the future.
I started noticing that major companies like Amazon.com and ebay started switching some of their servers to apache after microsoft released their pricing scheme for Win2k. I'm not sure if these large e-commerce sites really want to pay thousands of dollars in licensing for each server for the win2k upgrades. I'm sure they don't also want to pay that $1000+ license for having a "largish" web site per server. I think win2k will be the downfall of microsoft.
The topic was a question, and the post was the answer. Just a clarification.
Except for an older version of mySQL that was relicensed, mySQL does not meet the Open Source Definion, and is not open source software.
As for your comments about Solaris not scaling -- I believe they're unfounded. The only problem I can find with Solaris scalability is the price tag. Those ultra enterprise boxes aren't cheap, and Solaris runs like a dog on anything less.
hi. this was not an official ebay announcement. word got out because we thanked the engineers at debian. which we do gratefully. we're a debian gnu/linux shop, who happen to work with ebay. the use of free software, the best stuff in our opinion, was OUR decision, not ebay's. cheers -- workspot
Guess what now it is. Kinda sorta:) I wish Drovak had his email address available to the public, oh well.
Ian
Hey now! I'm as Gnu/Linux'y as the next /.'er, but at least I'll have the guts to say that Sun makes a good product. The OS may be slower than some others, but it's solid, stable, and not buggy in the least. The hardware, with a few exceptions (Cough.. HME.. Cough..) is also quite good. As for the Sun scalability issue, it scales well. (I won't go so far to say it scales better than Linux, because I don't have my asbestos long-johns with me).
Do you have some sort of inherent grudge against Oracle? Oracle is slower than many other DB's, but it is by design. Oracle takes great lengths to make everything is pristine; it is one of the factors one considers when selecting a DB.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Oracle releases first on Solaris. If a database as sound as Oracle released first on Debian, Linux would dominate the back-end and Sun would be competing toe-to-toe with Intel in the hardware business ...
Geez, I've been wondering why eBay has had so many problems with keeping their systems up, and now I understand why. They shouldn't have to go with this proxy kind of architecture. If they had a well structured back end, which seperated presentation from the rest of the applicaiton, they'd write a new presentation layer which spoke directly to the back end, instead of having the overhead of their main servers generating the HTML and then the proxy server parsing it and generating new HTML.
sigs are a waste of space
I know WAP is yet to become popular, but I believe it's a well designed mechanism for devices with limited resources to access information. It's structured in a similar way to HTML, and standards-based. There will be a lot of different Internet appliances similar to Palm VII, Qualcomm pdQ and the like, and if each of them uses a different subset or a different "simplified" dialect of HTML, we developers will have a tough time.
I predict WAP will explode in Europe this Spring, when new GSM handsets with WAP capabilities hit the market and those creative Scandinavians find zillions of new ways of employing WAP in e-commerce. I guess the US will follow, and then all major e-commerce sites/companies will have to design WAP versions of their sites anyway. I understand they have to cater to the Palm VII crowd now, but Palm should see the light and release a WAP browser for Palm VII soon. I guess it will be a lot easier for everyone when all vendors standardize on WAP.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
--Cut to a smoke filled room....
We'll get the bid because our solution is quick-n-dirty. No software costs, just toss it out in Perl. We can just put in a good all nighter and get it working! We'll come in miles under those other bids for cost and schedule.
But a week down the road, eBay changes or adds a page and the damn thing breaks. They go to fix it, but it's all horribly obfuscated Perl and regexes. External consultants and internal programmers alike recoil in horror at it. Who can fix it? We can! We built the thing, afer all. We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk. The code will never be stable! Every change eBay makes will ripple down into our layer. Woo hoo!! Jackpot! A lifetime of suckling at the eBay teat!
a 'workspot', as we think of it, is a linux desktop you can use through a browser. it's server-side computing, including software rental, with a linux interface. store your stuff on it, run your applications on its vnc connection, serve up web sites. that's the idea. desktop.com, and a lot of similar things, have their own interfaces. "why not just use linux as is?" we asked ourselves. we hope to prod more people to port software to linux, and work on the ui generally, by offering a bigger market -- net surfers. we're just getting started here -- please be gentle.
:We can just put in a good all nighter and
:get it working!
exactly... first to market. Perl is a great rapid development platform. get your idea prototyped first and running while everyone else waits for $LARGE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY's $PORTAL_SOLUTION or $WIRELESS_EVERYTHING_IN_A_BOX software to be finished, debugged, beta tested...
:We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as
:more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk
lemme guess... you're a contract Windows NT support person?
okay, flames aside, I'll grant you that one-off apache-php-perl-$DATABASE solutions can easily become unmanageable, and there's probably more than a few companies who had their guru leave and weren't able to maintain their site.
I see that as their fault for not documenting everything, or requiring the developers to document it.
Perl's not the right choice for everything, but it's great for rapid deployment since you can use so much existing code. Nobody's forcing anybody to use PERL to beat their competitors to the market...
they usually don't get fed quacamole :-)
Don't feed the trolls.
+&x
I've seen several notes which mention Ebay's instability problems and the use of Solaris/Oracle on Ebay. There is no doubt the database servers are very critical, but it looks like the application logic itself runs on NT & IIS. I had my own share of frustration with Ebay services in the past, and I believe the database was not to blame. Look at this URL:
& item=555555555
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem
(I made the item number up, but this is the correct form of URL to look up an item)
I know most server-side programming techniques allow aliases for server side apps/objects (i.e. I can write a Java servlet and call it "whateverISAPI.dll"), but the URL suggests that Ebay application logic is nothing but a bunch of ISAPI DLLs written for use with IIS. I would guess Ebay applications are written as ISAPI filters using MS Visual C++, and run on MS Windows NT servers running IIS. Or they have a really good reason to use another technology and call the program "ebayISAPI.dll".
Does anyone here know what Ebay runs on? Can anyone verify my guess, which I believe is pretty obvious to many Slashdotters.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
You are on crack. I don't care how much flaming I get, but Solaris and Oracle could and can easily nail Linux to the floor. I have been running both a Linux and Intel Solaris 7 for many, many months now and Linux cannot even begin to compete with Solaris in scalability, stability, or shear power than a properly used Sun box can deliver. If they were really interested in power, why didn't they go with an IBM RS/6000 server or an IBM AS/400. These are the true database powerhouses. Fact in point.
Back when Linux didn't have a decent presentation
package, Linus T wold do his presentations about
Linux useing MS Powerpoint.
The moral ? Everything has it's purpose ( except
NT Server ).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
For those who don't know and haven't visited, workspot gives you the standard "stash your filez here" interface, but...there's this intriguing little tab up top labeled "Linux Desktop." You click on it, and are asked for the screen geometrics you want to use. A quick click later, and you're looking at a KDE desktop! Through the magic of AT&T's VNC Java viewer, you get your very own KDE session, where you can do whatever you'd normally do on a "regular" Linux box and account.
This is very neat, and I think I'll kill another hour playing with it.
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Nice to see free software, once again, as part of the back-end middleware solution, but how about supporting wireless *clients* using Linux?
;)
There is a driver for Mobitex modems(*) that gives you datalink through network layer capabilities; so we at least have the hardware support.
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* written by guess who.