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Showing posts from 2005

BusinessWeek article about LAMP stack, Slashdotted again

There was a great article about LAMP and ActiveGrid by Steve Hamm in BusinessWeek today that was Slashdotted and started YAFF (yet another flame war) very reminiscent of when we were Slashdotted last year. To sum up the article, it lists a few indisputable facts: Google, Yahoo, and a lot of Web 2.0 companies such as Friendster, Flickr, and Facebook are using open source stacks like LAMP instead of Java. There are more and more developers and websites using PHP, as evidenced by booksales and Netcraft stats. Companies like Merrill Lynch write processor intensive code in C/C++ directly on Linux and script it rather than use Java API's, presumably because they want more perfromance and do not care about platform portability out of Linux. .Net is getting used a lot more in enterprises (something I have seen in quite a few large accounts and which Sun even acknowledges in the article). "Earlier this year, [IBM] threw its weight behind PHP as a Web programming language."

The end of desktop software

Our engineering team has grown quite a bit, and I needed to better track our 1.0 release process. It has been a while since I have directly managed an engineering project, but I have done it before with Microsoft Project. So I order it and it arrives a couple of days later. I then had a very bizarre experience, almost like an archaelogical dig. It was a shrink wrapped box entitled "Microsoft Project 2003". 2003??? This code hadn't been touched in three years! I opened the box (yes, it is still a pain) and took out the CD and installed the software. I haven't installed software like this in years. I then entered everybody's tasks, task hierarchies, and such. Project was incredibly difficult to use, stuff that should have been obvious was very obtuse. Then I wanted to publish the Gantt chart in HTML for our intranet. Tried for hours. Couldn't do it. Finally I printed out the chart, taped six sheets of paper together, and posted it on the wall in our

Web 2.0: Don't try this at work

One of the big drivers of Internet applications in the corporate world was the stark contrast of what people could do at home and at work: At Home: Buy books, buy movie tickets, look up the weather, etc. At Work: Call HR to change health plan, call factory floor to find out what happened to customer's order, call invoicing to find out what happened to a bill, etc. Well clearly something at work was wrong, and soon enough everything was online. :) Now look at the difference between home and work today: At Home: Web applications are using JavaScript and DHTML to enhance the user experience and decrease server interactions. Some random guy can combine Google Maps and Craigslist apartment listings in a useful way without talking to either Google or Craigslist ( http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/ ). At Work: Everything has a Netscape 3 level of UI interactivity and nothing works with anything else. This difference in functionality and the increasing expectations of users will lea

WS-Nothing

A couple of weeks ago I participated on an application server panel at Web Services Edge hosted by Anne Thomas Manes. There was quite a bit of discussion about WS-This and WS-That and WS-Foo and WS-Bar. Essentially, this Web Services thing has devolved into a huge unintelligible morass. The panel was covered today in LinuxWorld , which liked an ad-hoc term I used: WS-Nothing . Vendors Have Been Arguing for So Long That You Have to Send Text Files Around On the panel, I said that we vendors have lost sight of the fact that we have been bickering so long that the only way our products can talk to each other is to send text files around. We are now in the process of screwing even that up with all of these competing specifications about how to mark up self-describing text files. It is of no supprise that Web Services have not had a big uptake with customers; they don't even know where to start. The point of web services is interoperability, and if the Web Service produced by a particul