Re: anti-advocacy: Larry Seltzer, pcmag May'01 pub.

Well, well... PC-Mag, as most ZD-Net and IDG mag's, are in my opinion too dependant on Micro$oft advertising to make any "real" reviews on anything. And, as Joe Brown said, their target readers are windows-users. The "normal" windows user can't possibly read and/or understand ASCII code in an editor, it has to bee in a fancy "IDE tool" with lots of blips and gizmos. Well, he's right in one statement; PHP, MySQL and Apache are most stable on the Un*x (read Linux) platform. They were developed by Un*x people, for Un*x platforms. Never the less, the windows versions of these products do a terrific job. The problem is what you define as "production environment" and "stable for production". In the history of Un*x the standards are set very high. All those 99.9999....% statements require some really goood software. These conditions can, in my opinion, never be met in any windows environment. The Micro$oft platforms just isn't that stable themself. Still PHP, MySQL and Apache work very fine on the windows platform. In comparission to other (read Micro$oft) products they DO perform well and are VERY stable. Another problem is that people tend to think it's a pice of cake to set up a webserver. If you take any standard, out of the box solution, yes. But, to set up a webserver with some functionality, databases and intelligence needs some knowledge. Some really good ideas in how to seperate homepage development from server management and development can be found in Sterling Hughes "Top 21 PHP progamming mistakes - Part I: Seven Textbook Mistakes" #16. "Not separating client side from server side" (http://www.zend.com/zend/art/mistake.php). Poeple tend to look at client side and server side development as the same thing, and that's not true. Though Micro$oft often mislead people to that idea... /Johan Hmmm, that tended to be quite misspelled and long, sorry bout that...