Hi Marc,
> |To your point on the client driving the server - and to my point that
> |interconnects becoming transparent does not change the equation (I don't
> |care where my application runs, or how many machines it runs on,
> |or which OS
> |these machines run, or what hardware the OS runs on,...) - MS
>
>
> That is not correct.
>
> *you* don't care what OS or hardware your server app runs on ???? ohhhh I
> don't believe that, are you a student are you .edu? in fact I come from a
> background (SAP) where people would spend *months* and $M just figuring
> **that** out.
>
> Only a developer, and a clueless one at that, would say that.
>
> sysadmins RULE THE WEB. Do you understand? they DEEPLY care what OS and
> certainly what HARDWARE their stuff is running on. Look for that
> spark (pun
> intended) in their eyes when they talk about the backup strategies in
> distributed secured systems. You can't fuck with that.
>
> You don't care, he cares, deeply.
This isn't the whole truth either.
If you already have a heavy investment in a particular platform then quite
often the choice is already made. If this paltform isn't Windows then J2EE
is on home ground. If you have to choose a platform then you *do* care that
the one you select is the right one but, you *don't* care that it is AS/400,
some Unix variant, Win2K or other. Last time I checked there wasn't much to
choose between them except cost & availability of skilled technical people
for the platform.
So the question really becomes which platform X is the one for me ?. This is
usually where the religious crusaders begin to sharpen their knives. That a
platform runs Java is irrelevant [it doesn't win it any brownie points]
really but it is a good sell for Java. If it was relevant then Sun would
stop making J2EE for Windows - to deny it any points - which they clearly
are not (can not?). They probably hope that once you commit to Java they can
sell their systems as the best platform for Java and hey?, you don't have to
do anything to move your systems across...
...of course Win2K is not NT3.51 or NT4. Win2K can hold it's own quite
comfortably. Except on source code availability.
> Java has made the development indenpendent from the deployment.
> Thank GOD!
> I was working in this shop where we did a big server app with fancy win32
> clients all on HTTP/XML communication. It was server java (of course) and
> the DEPLOYMENT environment was INDEPENDENT (TOTALLY) from the development.
> They benched Linux and windows (2 years ago) and went with NT
> because of the
> state of VMs at the time. Had the VMs been good (like they are
> today) and I
> know they would have taken Linux for the ease of admin in farms. The fact
> that we used MS visual J was IRRELEVANT.
>
> So imho the big "seamless development environement" gospel from tool
> vendors, is is a lot of goo. It is just gospel from tool vendors.
I dunno it is pretty compelling when you can debug right from a web page in
a browser on a client, into the ASP code that produced the web page, into
the COM component the ASP page calls, into the SQL Server stored procedure
that the COM component called. Hey you can even single step through the
damned stored proc!!. That's seamless and it gets my juices flowing just
like TogetherJ does...
> You develop it on development boxes
> it goes to QA
> You test on "sandboxes"
> couple weeks month later
> it might go into production
> in the cool env of war rooms
>
> Cycle again with the greatest of care and on all boxes.
>
> Separate people separate concerns separate budgets separate
> bosses separate
> building SEPARATE WORLDS etc etc...
>
> now go in a production environment holding that integrated candle
> to the SUN
> (pun intended) and watch the sysadmin slowly turn his face, to
> look at you,
> and see where that peeping voice is coming from. Take a good look in his
> darkened eyes, bleached by years of keeping these farms running. He will
> try to parse your statement, will fail, then quickly swap you out and go
> back to his console having made a "ln -s /home/bozo /dev/null" in
> his head.
>
> You just disapeared physically from his production world.
Are you saying that it is bad to have separate setup for development,
testing, staging, and live?. Are you saying that development should happen
on the same boxes as live?. I'm not sure I understand what you meant here.
My 2 cents is that this is a time-tried process. It isolates development
faux pars from bread-n-butter systems that just can't go down.
> I do buy that Windows **the OS** will dominate the workstation market, the
> tools? maybe for .net. So you can deploy on windows. I would even argue
> that you DON'T want integrated goo even in a pure MS world.
>
> But the code you produce will need to run on any platform cause
> you will be
> running Linux/BSD/Solaris/win2000 in the server farms... and ONLY j2ee is
> answering that today. .net, in the future, will be win2000 only.
>
> It's a stupid battle if you ask me... makes me wonder.
That it runs in many places that .NET is unlikely to do (in addition to
Windows - .NET's backyard) is J2EE's strength. That is has innovative tools
like jBoss, TogetherJ, JBuilder is further good news. But J2EE is unlikely
to force a platform decision because it runs everywhere. We should celebrate
jBoss/J2EE and the fact that it runs anywhere and leave .NET to blaze it's
own equally important trail.
> MS understands developers, they understand Client PCs, they understand
> "integrated development", they don't understand sysadmins, they don't
> understand networks, and I think they are NEW to the web services.
You are right, they understand don't sysadmins, they understand only Systems
Administrators ;-)
Micheal
