Re: Why PHP ? - devil's advocate

"Martin A. Marques" wrote: > > > > > > > > > With a Windows situation, yes, even tho I pay for it, I can go grab > > > > a binary, unzip, place in directory, stop/start server, *poof* - it > > > > works. > > > > > > Not always. > > > > Didn't say always - I said, in my case, around 85% of the time. Which is > > a higher success rate than my Linux software install rate. > > In my case, linux has out-leveled M$ windows in what is instalation and > configuration. Install Win2K and try to change it from a Primary Domain to a > Secondary Domain (normally you would be told to reinstall). Try to change the > Domain name (reinstall). Agreed, but we're getting a bit away from the PHPness of the main issue. My initiation of this was in response to 'why php?' - giving someone arguments as to why php should be considered as a development environment over MS/ASP. Original responses were very 'ASP sucks' type things. I've tried to present at least some reasons why, even though 'ASP sucks', people will continue to use it - primarily ease of installation and use. In your case, excellent, Linux has proven more beneficial than W2k. In our case, it's not always so cut and dried. > > > > > My success rate installing objects/libraries on Windows has been about > > > > 85%, with failures getting resolve more quickly as the people we bought > > > > it from were either responsive or included better docs. > > > > > > Hey, one more thing! How about performace? Resets, hangs, etc. > > > > It's a crapshoot - I've known Windows servers to be up for months at a > > time with moderately large traffic spikes, and others that needed rebooting > > every few days. Some of this is Windows, some is 3rd party libraries. > > In server buisness you can not afford to restart the server now and then. And > most of the resets are due to low performace, so the user resets the machine, > cause he gets better performace after the reboot. It's not a crapshoot, it's > reality. > Some people actually can - I worked for a place with 80 NT servers on ONE project. They could easily afford to drop 1 every 15 minutes or so for a reboot. (and actually did). Kludgy? Yes. But it worked. > > > It obviously works well enough for some people (even if it requires a lot > > of money and effort) otherwise no one would use it. > > > > I'm not saying Windows stuff is the best. I was speaking from a > > development standpoint that it's *often* faster to get required > > environments set up under Windows, at least for webserving purposes. It's > > a fairly homogenous system - people can distribute binaries and they pretty > > much just work. The majority of open source stuff I see is distributed > > primarily as source - compile yourself. This is where a large amount of > > frustration comes in, because there are *so* many different variations in > > platforms/compilers/linking/etc. > > You can pay a company to get you precompiled binaries of the app. There are > so many opensource companies out there. > I'm not sure if you tried looking for one of those? :-) > Actually, I'd like some URLs. I've not come across many open source companies that will charge you for binaries. Unless you're talking about Linux distro companies themselves. Which doesn't always hold water - I'm thinking specifically of Caldera NOT offering binaries of KDE2 because 'it's not stable yet' (I think that was the quote we got from their support people). And what types of binaries? Is there a company that will *cost-effectively* give me ready to run binaries of freetype, gd, pdflib, etc., whether I'm using Caldera, Slackware, Redhat, Suse or something else? Or maybe AIX or Solaris? I'm truly interested in finding out about such companies - we're over much of the learning curve with things, but we can always refer other people to them. If I've not heard of them, I'm sure others haven't either (no one at our local LUG has ever mentioned 'go see company X for this type of work', even tho the issue of compiling problems comes up now and then). > > Saludos... :-) Saludos tambien.... (rusty spanish lessons coming out!) ;) -- ========================== Michael Kimsal http://www.tapinternet.com PHP Training courses http://www.tapinternet.com/php