See? This is the kind of FUD people have been complaining about. You have zero information here about what would make Java scale better, but you still insist that it does.
All of the Java "best practices" stuff is full of warnings about how storing anything significant in the session will kill your performance. It's a huge mistake. Only truly transient data belongs in the session, regardless of language. And yes, PHP has various ways of doing distributed sessions, but frankly this sort of thing is overrated. It's VERY hard to go faster than MySQL with MyISAM tables for this kind of simple shared data.
PHP provides persistent connections, so the system does not need to reconnect to the database on each hit. It also provides various caching tools, like memcached. Charts and graphs are typically handled with third-party libraries. It's not exactly hard.
Sure, I could use an o/r mapping library. And something else for transaction management. And I could get at remote objects using plain RMI, using something else for a naming service.
That's just the point though: if you use JDO or Hibernate, you won't need anything else for transaction management. You won't need to do anything with remote objects because, well, there are hardly any applications that benefit from them (as opposed to just running lots of servlet engines with a load balancer). You also won't need a naming service, since you'll have no remote objects. What you will have is decent performance.
I really don't understand why people go on about the remote access to EJBs when the biggest performance-enhancing feature that expensive EJB servers offer is avoiding the remote call by routing it to a local container. That's why the introduction of the Local interface didn't improve performance on systems like BEA.
That's crazy talk. People gain jobs from OSS. OSS allows them to get good at programming or other technical work without paying a lot of money to learn it. Companies that use OSS employ people (like me) to write code with it. Anyone who was good at writing code for IIS should be able to switch to a job writing code for Apache, unless they are unwilling to learn it. The only ones who potentially suffer are the ones who got paid by Microsoft to create IIS, and they ought to be able to find something else to program on. Or maybe IBM will pay them to hack on Apache.
Imagine if lots of people decided to work on auto assembly lines in the spare time; what would that do to the gainful employment for auto workers?
Auto workers are not guaranteed a job, and neither are programmers. You have to keep up and change with the times if you want to stay employed.
Keeping the Solaris hardware costs them money. There are licensing fees, support contracts, and it's all being outsourced right now so they may not even own it. Replacing it with systems that have zero licensing costs seems like a big win to me, but only they know enough the economics involved to say for sure.
It doesn't have to be to PHP, it could just be to an open source Java platform, but get off your expensive proprietary platform before it drives you into the ground. Java has good enough performance when done well, but most commercial Java frameowrks make it hard or impossible to write anything that isn't bloated, so ditch that thing. If you are good with PHP and your site is reasonably simple that should work fine. So would Python, Perl, simple Java servlets, etc. Static publishing (from a database) is a great idea if you can get away with it.
Ditch Solaris and go with Linux or FreeBSD on Intel hardware. Amazon and AOL did it and saved buckets of money, so you should feel confident that you can do it too.
mod_perl is used at many sites, including ticketmaster.com and citysearch.com. It has better performance than PHP. Amazon is using Perl with FastCGI, which is pretty much the same thing as mod_perl with a proxy server.
Re:Is there anything in there...
on
Practical mod_perl
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· Score: 4, Informative
There are several things that can stop apache children from growing out of control, and yes, they are documented in the book. One thing that helps is the use of modules like Apache::SizeLimit and Apache::ResourceLimit. Another thing that helps is using a proxy server. You also need to set MaxClients correctly. Beyond that, writing code that doesn't suck goes a long way.
Oh please, of course he knows that JSP is a part of J2EE. The point is obviously that straight JSP is quite different from using the whole deal with EJBs, etc. as recommended by Sun in their samples apps and publications.
You know, if you do all the work required to make JSP manageable with JavaBeans and such, you end up writing a lot of code for a simple application. Writing a maintainable MVC-pattern application in a scripting language typically takes less work, even with things like Struts available.
I just played a good game of Unreal Tournament 2003 on my Linux box. It plays great, the installer came on the CD, and all updates have been available for Linux. If Valve doesn't care about you, spend your money somewhere else.
No I'm not. I'm well aware of the distinctions, but when people do this sort of study they always use EJB since that's what Sun tells them to do.
Struts, Velocity and Hibernate are J2EE.
No they aren't. They are built on top of J2EE concepts like servlets, but they are not part of the J2EE spec.
Anyone who uses JSP or servlets is using J2EE
Yes. Servlets are unavoidable, but JSP should be avoided if possible.
Many of the features of EJBs are now superceded by JDO (Java Data Objects)
Yes, but I don't think there's any open source JDO that can compete with Hibernate for performance.
an object/relational layer that makes database interfacing hugely faster and more scalable and more portable than with PHP/Perl etc.
Now you're just talking out of ignorance. Have you done serious development with PHP and Perl? Do you have any idea what O/R tools are available for Perl? I do. And O/R tools are typically about productivity and abstraction, not scalability. Those myths that companies like Toplink tried to sell us about how their magical caching layer would do everything an RDBMS have not panned out. Simple caching works though, and is just as easy to do in Perl or PHP as it is in Java.
Actually, I know people who work at both Amazon and Yahoo. I am not just making this stuff up. Amazon is running their apparel store and some of their other stuff on Mason, a Perl development framework, and are moving the rest of their site over to it. They also use C/C++. I don't think they use Java for anything you see on the site. Yahoo uses just about every language there is, but the backbone of much of their stuff is written in languages like Perl and Python, with PHP for delivering final templated pages in at least some cases.
This article really has nothing to do with Linux. It's about J2EE vs..NET. No surprise that J2EE is expensive. The best Java developers on Linux use much better tools than J2EE and EJBs. A good open source stack with Struts, Velocity, and Hibernate will beat the stuffing out of straight J2EE for productivity. Of course there is also the fact that lots of web development on Linux is done in much more productive languages, like Perl, Python, and PHP. Amazon and Yahoo (on FreeBSD) do it, so it's probably good enough for your lame little site too.
This article is from NewsFactor. They crank out content-less drivel like this every day. You would be hard-pressed to find a less-informed news source about IT. The fact that this made it onto Yahoo is not surprising, since it's just a feed, but the fact that it got picked up (and thus legitimized) by Slashdot amazes me.
"No, don't click through"
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 4, Funny
Companies often pay people to write positive reviews of their mechandise on sites like Amazon. If there are tons of reviews and they all love it, you're probably okay, but things with just a few reviews could be from company employees, or the CEO's sister, etc. Unlike Consumer Reports, these sites make no claims that the reviews are unbiased.
As many comments on this previous story point out, what they do at Ace's Hardware is not very impressive. They don't get much traffic, and they are serving what are essentially static pages. If they replaced their caching system with a bunch of static pages (generated by spidering their page generator maybe), it would have better performance. That's what Slashdot does for the front page when you aren't logged in.
CIOs with actual technical knowledge? What kind of bizarro world are you living in? I've met a couple of CIOs, and the only technology they had a good grasp on was the voice-mail on their cell phones. CIOs today are deal-makers, not technical wizards. They play golf with salesmen and blow the company's money on expensive application servers.
It seems pretty clear to me that they chose that name only because "Windows" is the name of a successful operating system. They certainly seem to be attempting to cash in on the assiociations that consumers have with the product called Windows, and that is the part that matters with trademark law, isn't it?
EJBs do not help with this situation. The database is the point of contention either way. Caching will help for read-only data, but you certainly don't need EJBs to do caching.
Slashdot Mirror
See? This is the kind of FUD people have been complaining about. You have zero information here about what would make Java scale better, but you still insist that it does.
All of the Java "best practices" stuff is full of warnings about how storing anything significant in the session will kill your performance. It's a huge mistake. Only truly transient data belongs in the session, regardless of language. And yes, PHP has various ways of doing distributed sessions, but frankly this sort of thing is overrated. It's VERY hard to go faster than MySQL with MyISAM tables for this kind of simple shared data.
PHP provides persistent connections, so the system does not need to reconnect to the database on each hit. It also provides various caching tools, like memcached. Charts and graphs are typically handled with third-party libraries. It's not exactly hard.
That's just the point though: if you use JDO or Hibernate, you won't need anything else for transaction management. You won't need to do anything with remote objects because, well, there are hardly any applications that benefit from them (as opposed to just running lots of servlet engines with a load balancer). You also won't need a naming service, since you'll have no remote objects. What you will have is decent performance.
I really don't understand why people go on about the remote access to EJBs when the biggest performance-enhancing feature that expensive EJB servers offer is avoiding the remote call by routing it to a local container. That's why the introduction of the Local interface didn't improve performance on systems like BEA.
Imagine if lots of people decided to work on auto assembly lines in the spare time; what would that do to the gainful employment for auto workers?
Auto workers are not guaranteed a job, and neither are programmers. You have to keep up and change with the times if you want to stay employed.
Keeping the Solaris hardware costs them money. There are licensing fees, support contracts, and it's all being outsourced right now so they may not even own it. Replacing it with systems that have zero licensing costs seems like a big win to me, but only they know enough the economics involved to say for sure.
Ditch Solaris and go with Linux or FreeBSD on Intel hardware. Amazon and AOL did it and saved buckets of money, so you should feel confident that you can do it too.
mod_perl is used at many sites, including ticketmaster.com and citysearch.com. It has better performance than PHP. Amazon is using Perl with FastCGI, which is pretty much the same thing as mod_perl with a proxy server.
There are several things that can stop apache children from growing out of control, and yes, they are documented in the book. One thing that helps is the use of modules like Apache::SizeLimit and Apache::ResourceLimit. Another thing that helps is using a proxy server. You also need to set MaxClients correctly. Beyond that, writing code that doesn't suck goes a long way.
Oh please, of course he knows that JSP is a part of J2EE. The point is obviously that straight JSP is quite different from using the whole deal with EJBs, etc. as recommended by Sun in their samples apps and publications.
You know, if you do all the work required to make JSP manageable with JavaBeans and such, you end up writing a lot of code for a simple application. Writing a maintainable MVC-pattern application in a scripting language typically takes less work, even with things like Struts available.
Has anyone else noticed this? It returns a sitefinder page immediately for blahblahsucks.com, but nada for verisignsucks.com.
I just played a good game of Unreal Tournament 2003 on my Linux box. It plays great, the installer came on the CD, and all updates have been available for Linux. If Valve doesn't care about you, spend your money somewhere else.
No I'm not. I'm well aware of the distinctions, but when people do this sort of study they always use EJB since that's what Sun tells them to do.
Struts, Velocity and Hibernate are J2EE.
No they aren't. They are built on top of J2EE concepts like servlets, but they are not part of the J2EE spec.
Anyone who uses JSP or servlets is using J2EE
Yes. Servlets are unavoidable, but JSP should be avoided if possible.
Many of the features of EJBs are now superceded by JDO (Java Data Objects)
Yes, but I don't think there's any open source JDO that can compete with Hibernate for performance.
an object/relational layer that makes database interfacing hugely faster and more scalable and more portable than with PHP/Perl etc.
Now you're just talking out of ignorance. Have you done serious development with PHP and Perl? Do you have any idea what O/R tools are available for Perl? I do. And O/R tools are typically about productivity and abstraction, not scalability. Those myths that companies like Toplink tried to sell us about how their magical caching layer would do everything an RDBMS have not panned out. Simple caching works though, and is just as easy to do in Perl or PHP as it is in Java.
Actually, I know people who work at both Amazon and Yahoo. I am not just making this stuff up. Amazon is running their apparel store and some of their other stuff on Mason, a Perl development framework, and are moving the rest of their site over to it. They also use C/C++. I don't think they use Java for anything you see on the site. Yahoo uses just about every language there is, but the backbone of much of their stuff is written in languages like Perl and Python, with PHP for delivering final templated pages in at least some cases.
This article really has nothing to do with Linux. It's about J2EE vs. .NET. No surprise that J2EE is expensive. The best Java developers on Linux use much better tools than J2EE and EJBs. A good open source stack with Struts, Velocity, and Hibernate will beat the stuffing out of straight J2EE for productivity. Of course there is also the fact that lots of web development on Linux is done in much more productive languages, like Perl, Python, and PHP. Amazon and Yahoo (on FreeBSD) do it, so it's probably good enough for your lame little site too.
This article is from NewsFactor. They crank out content-less drivel like this every day. You would be hard-pressed to find a less-informed news source about IT. The fact that this made it onto Yahoo is not surprising, since it's just a feed, but the fact that it got picked up (and thus legitimized) by Slashdot amazes me.
That just makes me want to click it more!
Companies often pay people to write positive reviews of their mechandise on sites like Amazon. If there are tons of reviews and they all love it, you're probably okay, but things with just a few reviews could be from company employees, or the CEO's sister, etc. Unlike Consumer Reports, these sites make no claims that the reviews are unbiased.
As many comments on this previous story point out, what they do at Ace's Hardware is not very impressive. They don't get much traffic, and they are serving what are essentially static pages. If they replaced their caching system with a bunch of static pages (generated by spidering their page generator maybe), it would have better performance. That's what Slashdot does for the front page when you aren't logged in.
CIOs with actual technical knowledge? What kind of bizarro world are you living in? I've met a couple of CIOs, and the only technology they had a good grasp on was the voice-mail on their cell phones. CIOs today are deal-makers, not technical wizards. They play golf with salesmen and blow the company's money on expensive application servers.
It certainly looks to me like the basic Red Hat Network for $60 per year provides everything you want.
This is what bugs me about the
It seems pretty clear to me that they chose that name only because "Windows" is the name of a successful operating system. They certainly seem to be attempting to cash in on the assiociations that consumers have with the product called Windows, and that is the part that matters with trademark law, isn't it?
EJBs do not help with this situation. The database is the point of contention either way. Caching will help for read-only data, but you certainly don't need EJBs to do caching.