Wednesday, October 30, 2002

Russel's .NOT rants justified by TSS "microsoft-sponsored" benchmark ? Not all of it. TMC J2EE REPORT PURE M$ FUD. Ahhhh... It seems that Rickard was on to the truth, thank goodness. He's put up a detailed rebuttal online pointing out the flaws in the report, and The Server Side has also posted more information on their forum, including this bit: * Was Microsoft involved in this, did they fund this, where were the tests done? Yes, Microsoft was certainly involved, as the paper describes. The Middleware Company approached Microsoft regarding performing such an experiment. Microsoft provided the lab, which was located in Seattle, funded the setup costs, and reimbursed us for expenses, including travel expenses. ... Suddenly my rantings are making sense, hey? (Crap, that's scary even to me.) -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] Mmm. It's well know that FUD's been MS' favorite tactics, and this TSS report seems to be exactly that. It disappoints me from the TSS people. Especially because it would be interesting to have a real balanced and independent benchmark performed and TSS was very well placed to provide it. I'd like to see a consultancy create one such benchmark. People like Accenture or Cap Gemini. Or some technical analysts, like the Patricia Seybold group. Too bas Sun, BEA andf IBM were not involved. Bah, benchmarks are often rigged anyway, and there's no standard benchmark in this area yet. Russel's rant make sense on one point: MS uses Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt tactics, and their marketing muscles are strong. But I still think that the java world should fight back by product excellence rather than adding more noise to the cacophony. 2:43:17 PM    comment []

Yahoo moves from C++ to PHP Yahoo Moving to PHP [Slashdot] Michael Radwin's presentation about Yahoo's switch from C++ to PHP is a good complement to Tim O'Reilly's discussion about the types of Free Software Businesses. In the few categories that Tim identifies it seems to me that Yahoo is switching from the 2nd to the first: Company relies on free software and additional proprietary software or other IP, and thinks of itself as part of the F/OSS community even though not all its software is free. Examples: Collab.Net, Sleepycat, Aladdin, O'Reilly Company relies heavily on free software and additional proprietary software, but disregards free software ideology and doesn't think of itself as part of the F/OSS community. Examples: Google, Amazon, TiVo But as Michael recognizes (the preso viewer he uses is full of javascript and is not RESTful at all, so I can't link the exact slide, http://public.yahoo.com/~radwin/talks/yahoo-phpcon2002_files/slide0062.htm redirects back to the first page. Looking at the source a link with a target="PPTSld" should work ): they don't give back much to the open source yet. • We customize Open Source software we use  – often improvements are not sent back  – many are gross Y!-specific hacks • Improving our relationship with OS community  – FreeBSD (Peter Wemm)  – Apache (Sander van Zoest)  – PHP (Rasmus Lerdorf)  – MySQL (Jeremy Zawodny) The fact that they did not choose java because: But you can’t really use Java w/o threads Threads support on FreeBSD is not great Looks to me like a poor excuse: they could host the java stuff on Linux boxes instead of BSD. On the other hand I understand the necessity to standardize on one OS for deployment. Then maybe invest to make threads in java on BSD better performing. This all reminded me the discussions we had at Netcenter in 1999, when I was working there. Netscape also had its own proprietary template engine, implemented in C++, with a proprietary template language. I was advocating to move all that crap to java servlets. In retropect I think I was maybe a little too young and did not look at the scaling requirements well enough. On the other hand I don't think the Netcenter engine guys did any benchmarks of the java servlet containers at that time to see how they scaled. I wonder what they use now. 10:28:25 AM    comment []