SQL Server Express isn’t going to do it for something that requires SSIS and sure IIS comes with Windows but show me how that’s free the OS is not free.

What am I missing?

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i always used to say PHP compared to ASP.NET is more like a little knife compared to a big electric saw
you can’t cut big tree with the knife but you can use it to make artistic crafts
php is good for small cool ideas, but when it comes to enterprise software and scalability things get messy
have you ever heard about 3 tiers in PHP?
do you think you can handle ERP systems with PHP spagheti code? or mysql that can’t support transactions?

Sorry but I still find myself disagreeing with some of your comments.

>because open source software mosly is developed without an integration design in mind
lets take for instace microsoft products
the office is integrated with the browser and the browser is integrated with the active directory authentication protocol which is supported by the iis
have you ever seen any product in the FOSS that looks like AD?
have you ever seen any product in the FOSS like the biztalk? or office? or MOSS?

MS products tightly integrate with MS products mostly by using proprietary technology (i.e. not open standards). This is fine if you are a MS shop and don’t mind the vendor lock-in. Commercial competitors often use this approach as well. For an alternative to AD see Fedora Directory Server. For Biztalk, see Mule. For MOSS, see Alfresco. For Office, there’s nothing come to think of it there’s no commercial competitor either.. lol.

>lets face
open office sux and is too slow
apache doesn’t stand a chance when compared to iis, have you ever though about clustering or load balancing using apache?

I agree that Office > OOo but then OOo isn’t complete crap – it’s just not as good as Office in the same way as alternative commercial products. IIS isn’t the only app server that can load balance or cluster but I agree that IIS6 is pretty neat.

>and yes, PHP, a coctail with various functions with no namespacing that make a functiionality like intellisense in visual studio is an impossible to do
no decent IDE to php till now
and oh yea, the php spaghiti code, html within code

All fair comment until you realise that PHP was/is a hell of a lot better than ASP. Things have moved on, .Net/ASP.Net are now here but by the same token we also have J2EE, Ruby, etc. PHP has improved as well. It’s possible to write fairly nice PHP using one of the many frameworks that are out there now (CodeIgniter, Cake, Smarty, etc). It’s possible to mix logic with markup in ASP.Net so it’s possible to write spaghetti in ASP.Net.

VS.Net is pretty good but I still prefer using Eclipse and IDEA. VS.Net only becomes usable for me with add-on products like Resharper, TestDriven, etc.

>open source software is not bad, it’s good because it’s free, but FOSS won’t solve your every day problems for free

Free as is beer is definitely appealing but I love the fact that you have the freedom to inspect/modify FOSS source code. FOSS _can_ solve everyday problems, but not all problems. You seem to have a problem with FOSS. Perhaps you’ve just not used any decent FOSS software. Since you’re a .Net developer perhaps you’d be interested in one of the following – Rhino Mocks, NHibernate, Castle Project, MbUnit, etc.

If you had moved from PHP to J2EE rather than .Net I would guess that you would have a different opinion of FOSS. The one thing that I think that Microsoft have done well is simplify some aspects of development by providing the entire stack in an easy to use package. Commercial Open Source companies seem to be waking up to this now as the end products are getting better and better – see Zimbra, Alfresco, RedHat, etc.

Regards

Often times it isn’t fair to address multiple (and separate) points of contention in a blog post, as it makes it hard to hold the individual discussions that they require.

My point on system level integration is that the Unix model (everything is a file, originating from the command line) works better for the kinds of system administration I do. From my perspective, it really doesn’t matter how well Microsoft can connect multiple GUI apps, because the kinds of things I’m interested in doing are made much easier for me in Bash scripts. Now I know that .net exposes access to the MMC (is that what it is called?) and allows me in .net to script a lot of system functions, but in the time that I have been working with computers that is still a relatively recent development which only serves to bring Windows (and all of its related technologies) up to the level of quality that Linux has always been (for me, can’t stress enough that this is my personal opinion).

Other people will come from other backgrounds, and they will be interested in other things. Microsoft being better or worse than any one else isn’t really that important to me at any given moment. The fundamental argument is can Open trump Closed. You can replace each side with any company or community can get a different answer. Is MySQL better than Oracle? Or is Open Office better than Microsoft Office? These questions might lead a lot of rational people to say many different things. I don’t think it really matters because none of these products (or their teams) is ever done, and so any advance one has over the other is likely to change anyways. But a common trend among people who start successful businesses is their ability to adapt to challenges that they do not initially foresee. This causes them to consider the long term impacts of what languages they choose or how they choose to build their product(s).

So the choice is between an accessible but closed platform or a challenging but open platform. I say that Microsoft is only marginally more accessible, and much more closed, than the free Open Source applications that I rely on. But then thats just me (and a hack of a lot of other people). I’m not totally clear on why I’m still involved in this conversation as I accept that making anyone agree with me won’t make my life any easier and might even send good hard working people down the wrong track. I guess I just wanted to address why something that is as powerful as .NET can be considered “un cool” and why that might not ever change.

One thing seems clear at least, that Open Source projects and their contributers wont back down from this. Their efforts are enriching computer science, and allowing future generations to find new and original ideas and capitalize on them. Richard Stallman (a man who I have had the pleasure of meeting on more than one occasion) believes (and I agree) that ideas shouldn’t be proprietary. This is the heart behind GNU which forms the basis behind most of the Open Source movement. Closed platforms (even if they contain Open components), in my book, are relics of a past era where computers were a mystery to 99.999(and then some) of their users. Linux, GCC, Apache, even Wikipedia are great examples of the masses ability to self govern and collaborate. They are not perfect models, but they show tremendous promise, and have produced tremendous value.

Ok Thats enough grand standing, really I need to finish this Ajax component serialization function (Don’t worry Thomas, I’m not after your Gaia Widgets market, I still think your library is cool).

The major difference that I see when it comes to the topic of the post is a divergence in long term factors.

If you’re developing an application to be used in a medium or large business, you know from the start that it will have a large user base and must be maintainable for the long haul. With this in mind, you’ll almost certainly go for Java or .NET, probably depending more on the existing IT infrastructure than any difference between the platforms (as they are very comparable).

However if you’re developing a startup application, your user base could be anything from 5 users to 5 million users, depending on the mood of the Internet when you release. In that scenario, a looser, cheaper platform will always be more popular. Something like Cake or Rails becomes a nightmare to maintain and scale, but brings you to market much quicker, cheaper, and easier.

They mouse over variables in PHP and extricate current values during debug, just like how you can with a quick watch. Yes. But everywhere on JCX’s site they list numerous examples of their INTELLISENSE support, like on their blog

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/blog

On their tutorial video where they select WHAT PHP MODULES SHOULD HAVE INTELLISENSE support

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/vsphp/tutorials/remote_server

Or INTELLISENSE for PHP screenshots

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/node/1452

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/node/1397

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/node/1355

The product even checks to see if your project’s includes exist or not:

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/node/1370

When I make my WordPress.NET port I’ll even include some of the intellisense screenshots from that. However, if this isn’t enough proof for you that JCX’s product does what it says it does, then I give up.

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/vsphp/tutorials/dotnet_debugging

One additional comment from me on PHP intellisense. On my Phalanger article a reader pointed out an intellisense plug-in for Visual Studio which I have since installed onto my development workstation. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it thoroughly but it looks promising for VS 2005:

Check it out: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/

It might work with the free express editions of Visual Studio but I am not sure; I have the academic editions of VS 2005 so my experience has been based on that.

First, what part of Active Directory are you so enamored with? Because Samba is a Free/Open Source application that can actually act as a co PDC or Backup DC directly alongside a Windows domain controller. That would seem like a reasonable measure of code maturity and enterprise reliability. But I admit to not being that much of a Windows networking guru.

Open Office is slow, but it has become a lot faster (fans of the application recall using it back when it was called Star Office), and it is trying to accomplish a much different goal (run on Windows, Mac and Linux) so they have to make different design choices. Some of these might come at the cost of deep system integration, but that line is moving closer and closer to Microsoft levels, and being free and open source anyone who is inclined can (and has) contribute changes that make it do more of what users want. Open Office is much more interested in being an office productivity platform that others build applications on top of than a productivity app. This is the same goal Microsoft has but they want to be the ones profiting form that platform. How successful would the web have been if Tim Berners-Lee was the only guy licensed to build web pages and everyone else had to pay a royalty? This is a BIG project with lofty goals, but if the Open Office Community team succeeds it could create a platform many times more powerful than anything a closed source team could produce.

The last time I checked my linux distribution came preloaded with Apache, and loading PHP support was as easy as checking a box in my package manager (or running ‘apt-get install php’ if I wanted to install from a command prompt). And yes I have considered load balancing, I setup a load balancing proxy that simply asked for the IP addresses of the boxes that were a part of my “farm”. One paragraph of documentation later I was up and running. If I wanted to get more complicated that that I could have used Linux Virtual Server and set up watchdog timers and heart beat monitors. All of this was controllable remotely from SSH, and worked with out issue (or reboot) for 100+ day uptimes (occasionally I would run ‘apt-get upgrade’ and all of my installed packages would get upgraded to the newest stable versions automatically, and I would reboot, though most of the time the reboot as totally unnecessary because Linux can distinguish between a user process and a system process, and there for rarely requires rebooting to replace versions of software.

As for MySQL. I don’t think you understand what MySQL is. MySQL is more like the AVI file format. It is a container for other storage engines that handles common subsystems like authentication (which is also pluggable). Underneath MySQL is MyIASM, MEMORY, InnoDB, BerkeleyDB, CSV, ndbcluster and IASM, and once MaxDB though SAP bought that, so its not part of the Free version. Each have different strengths and weaknesses. And in a single Database you can decide which table engine fits your needs on a table by table basis. 99% of the time a website just needs InnoDB (this is why Oracle bought the team that created that engine, though because it’s Open Source that means the engine is free to be maintained by other talented developers). But a database administrator is free to migrate their data as needed. The point is MySQL is a powerful platform that is capable of many things, this helps explain why they made over $40 Million in 2005 (http://www.news.com/MySQL-fills-Oracle-consumed-hole-in-database—page-2/2100-1012_3-6058930-2.html)

As for PHP intellisense, it has been a part of Zend Studio (The company that created PHP) for quite some time (and that program is written in Java), and works great. Now it’s a part of Eclipse and NetBeans, so it sounds like the community has responded to that need. As for code style. I completely agree that inline logic with HTML is messy, but you know that you don’t have to code that way (and ASP developers are often quite guilty of the same thing). There are template engines and even PHP compilers that helps you separate your code into clean display and business logic layers. If you code better applications you tend to see issues like large file handling get addressed.

I personally have found Open Source technologies very integratable. And while it might require more work initially (though in most cases I haven’t found that to be true), the reward has time and time again proven to be greater. Microsoft technologies haven’t always had a stellar record integrating with each other, but they have gotten better. However in the same time the Open Source community has been hard at work solving real business challenges and addressing needs like scale and security. The Open Source model means companies like IBM who get real benefits out of a stronger Linux OS (they make their money consulting and selling hardware) can devote serious money and developer time, and everyone else in the community can benefit. It also means people like myself who utilize Open Source software to build my business can make the kind of changes that meet my business needs without waiting for a larger company to address them and ask me to pay them for the upgrade.

And thats all I have to say, I really need to get back to my work.

I totally agree that many FOSS products are of poor quality, poor documentation and poor support. You could say the same for many closed source products.

What you forget is (or probably don’t realise is) that there are some extremely well run FOSS projects that turn out top notch software such as the Apache Foundation (HTTPD, Tomcat, Ant, Struts, Axis, log4j, etc), OpenSymphony (Quartz, SiteMesh, OSCache, etc), Eclipse Foundation (Eclipse), etc. Many of these projects are supported by software vendors such as IBM, Sun, Oracle, etc. These products are often based on J2EE. If you’re .Net only then there’s a chance that you’re not aware that Open Source pervades J2EE.

And then there are the commercial Open Source offerings, many with VC backing. Here are some examples:

RedHat – Linux is most definitely Enterprise grade. Many large corporation run mission critical applications on Linux in preference to or beside Windows.

Alfresco – probably the best example of an ECM that is built on FOSS projects such as Spring, Hibernate, MyFaces, Lucene, etc. It’s comparable to Documentum and MS SharePoint. http://www.alfresco.com/customers/.

JBoss – An enterprise grade application server comparable to WebLogic, WebSphere, etc. JBoss also maintains the Hibernate and jBPM projects. http://www.jboss.com/customers/index.

There are loads more – SugarCRM, Liferay, MySQL, SocialText, Xen….

Then of course there are the commercial products that use FOSS software. Documentum, Oracle, WebMethods, etc.

And finally there are the languages – Perl, PHP, Python, etc. You’ll find scripts written in these languages acting as the glue for a wide variety of systems (NASA, Google, etc).

Commercial software isn’t necessarily better or worse than Open Source. Microsoft for example makes some of the best software out there – Office, .Net, etc but at the same time are unable to better existing Open Source efforts – e.g. NDoc, log4net, MBunit, Nant.

And while I’m at it – a word on SOA. Of course it’s hyped – just like CORBA and SOAP were. Now we get SOA, which is just an architectural style, not a design pattern like you stated. We’re still stuck with imperfect interop technologies but at least we’ve got a nice buzzword to sell services and software with. FOSS projects that cater for SOA include Axis, CXF, Fuse, Mule, ServiceMix.

Regards