LAMP vs .NET
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I, too, was a little irritated that they went commercial, but the free version still works fine. It's like most other Open Source initiatives where you can purchase a support contract for a more solid version of the product if you need critical response to issues. As for .NET, it's the same idea that was described above, by Shog9, for PHP -- most of what you need to accomplish has already been developed. Active Directory and LDAP integration (with client pass-through authentication), WMI, networking and email libraries, encryption, security, file I/O, SQL Server integration, etc. Most of what you need for your solution already exists -- you need only assemble the puzzle to create your application. And, that's assuming that you can't find a C# or VB.NET example on The Code Project that does most of what you need and can be quickly and easily modified to your needs. I'm sure that this argument is simply an indicator of people not wanting to leave their comfort zone, but still curious about what others are using. I wouldn't know where to start with LAMP, but I have many years of familiarity with the inner workings of Windows to make the choice simple. Why should I spend so much time and effort trying to ramp up my knowledge about LAMP (especially when it comes to security) when I can do anything that I need to do with Windows and my existing skill set? I'm sure that anyone who has little or no Windows experience and lots of Linux experience feels the same way. Both OSs can do the job, so it's dependent on the preference of the implementation team on which platform to use as a base for their solution.
I agree. I started with .NET when it was in beta and unfortunately I left for LAMP. I created a number of websites with the LAMP stack, writing a lot of PHP so I definitely have some insight. PHP has matured since then but I wish I had returned to .NET much sooner. Enterprise development is where it's at for .NET.
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At work, we have been interviewing several web development companies to redo the company's website. What is interesting is that most companies (9 out of 10) work on the LAMP stack rather than ASP.NET. Of course the choice of technology for the company's web site is not a big deal, but I did find my observation interesting. I did expect the LAMP number to be high but not this high. It seems for content management LAMP is common where as for LOB applications ASP.NET is more common.
free vs paid?
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Dario Solera wrote:
There are several huge websites that run on Windows, for example StackOverflow, which handles 1million hits a day[^] with two webservers and one DB server*. That's pretty good in my opinion.
That is pretty good indeed. But the number of hits doesn't tell us anything about the performance of a server system. Only how popular it is. The number of hits would say something in combination with how many servers there are to handle the requests and the average time that a connection remains open. 1 million hits a day is a lot, but is merely 11 concurrent connections per second.
Dario Solera wrote:
In the end, what really matters is how tools are used. It's easy to write a so-so application on any platform, it's hard to build a great, performant and stable application on any platform.
On this one I totally agree! That's absolutely the main thing... Give the customer what he wants and needs!
Blue_Iced wrote:
11 concurrent connections per second
That would be 11 requests per second. You can't deduce the number of connections without knowing the average response time.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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At work, we have been interviewing several web development companies to redo the company's website. What is interesting is that most companies (9 out of 10) work on the LAMP stack rather than ASP.NET. Of course the choice of technology for the company's web site is not a big deal, but I did find my observation interesting. I did expect the LAMP number to be high but not this high. It seems for content management LAMP is common where as for LOB applications ASP.NET is more common.
The reason the LAMP number is high is a direct result of the implementation costs. "Company Web Sites" are very common and they're no longer a high value item for most companies. With the existence of frameworks like Drupal and tools like Wordpress and Feedburner and Google Analytics and like 20 different "cart" platforms, a lot of the common business requirements are satisfied by free tools. Outside of the frameworks, a lot of the important work now happens on the design and preparation side: make the site look nice, import / connect with the inventory system, integrate with the supply chain and train a few people on using the CMS (content management system). And then you host the site with Linux, which is free. And that's good because everyone wants the web-site to be cheap. So yes, there are some negative trade-offs here, but they're mostly irrelevant: - PHP is slower, but is your website really going to be under load? - MySQL really suffers under large datasets, but do you really have that much data? - These tools will all have to be taped together, but are users really going to notice? There are also some positive trade-offs here: - Linux is really easy to administer in these "copy-cat" scenarios. Configuring one site can be hell in man pages, but configuring similar sites over and over again is cheap. Until server 2008 / IIS 7, the same could not be said of MS tools. - The frameworks & tools are all free, no license fees or third-party tools means that the client can get their code with no strings attached. - The dev tools are "free" (and so are the devs some times) And this last point is a big one. As a guy who's worked multi-million dollar projects in both PHP and ASP.NET (and ASP.NET on Mono on EC2), trust me that good WINS (MS-stack) development is ridiculously more efficient than good LAMP development. The tool-chain is just so much more evolved. But when you're ordering a web site, it won't matter. Most of the code is just "glue" code and most of the effort has very little to do with development. Most of the effort is design and admin setup with some database work and some configuration work. Plus the average pay for PHP developers is well below that of the "corporate" Java and .NET guys. So the work done on the LAMP stack is done even cheaper. So this is why LAMP dominates the field. The benefits of the WINS stack are basically irrelevant to the task of delivering a good-looking, typical web site. Now don't get me wrong, I love my .NET development. My
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Do you have any experience with mod_mono and enterprise applications in ASP.NET? I'm curious about how well does it works... Thanks!
Sorry for the late reply but unfortunately no enterprise apps. I was just thinking out loud. But most of my customers (read all) still prefer to pay for software in order to get support. Which for me is very weird way of working. Why pay upfront for something in the hope it will fail and you get your money worth in support ... but I guess this is some kind of mystique power that sales reps have over managers.