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My company is also in the process of moving off of witango
due to stability, support and cost concerns. We decided to migrate to
coldfusion with the mach-ii framework. The process has been surprisingly
easy and smooth. Coldfusion is very easy to learn and has many similar
functions as witango. Porting the .tcf files into coldfusion's components allows
us to retain almost all of the same programming logic without having to
re-engineer our applications. The java based open source eclipse SDK
development platform has been one of the best development tools I've used to
date, and it's free. There are modules available for coldfusion, php,
asp, xml, html, subversioning, database, etc.
So far the decision to move to coldfusion/mach-ii has
worked very well for our company, other companies considering migrating away
from Witango may also want to consider it.
d
From: Michael Dittbrenner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 4:33 PM To: witango-talk@witango.com Subject: RE: Witango-Talk: Tough question Robert We have also made the
same decision as you and for the same reasons. My witango server CONSTANTLY goes
down. We have decided to go with a LAMP stack instead. Plus the amount of
developers. Its a lot easier to get a PHP
developer. Mike
D ****************************************
[Phone]
610-499-9200 From: Robert
Garcia [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Take a look at Zend/PHP. Pay special attention to the
Zend Platform. I haven't posted it yet, but I have decided to
completely move off of the witango platform for many reasons, and we have just
purchased our licenses for Zend. Why PHP over others? First, I wouldn't have chosen php on its own, it was the
zend package that made it the witango killer for me. Only $999 per cpu per year,
with unlimited support. This have been my main beef with Witango. The support,
IMHO, has a lot to be desired. I am tired of asking for left out documentation,
and dealing with many bugs, especially in the
studio. Witango has always had one great benefit, its fast to
get to prototype. But this is completely negated by a couple of
factors. 1. Too many bugs in the studio that cuz workarounds,
rebuilding actions, crashing, taking more time than you desire. Especially the
!CST bug on the mac. I have to check each taf in a text editor, and fix manually
many times. 2. Text encoding issues, and other undocumented
problems. For instance, witango most of the time expects ISO-8859-1 and outputs
it, but not always, and the only way to find out, is tear your hair out trial
and error. I have asked for help/documentation, but apparently I don't own
enough servers, or this isn't considered installation support, so I have to pay
$1500 support subscription, to get it. One issue that took me many hours to get
right, was that when you send text through a bean, Witango expects ASCII coming
out, and converts it to ISO. This was very hard to detect. If I sent out ISO
from the bean, it didn't work, and if I sent ascii, and then looked for ascii,
it didn't work, but if I sent out ASCII from the bean, and then treated the
witango text from the bean as ISO, it worked. I have asked Witango Inc, for 2.5+
years to provide documentation on the beanhandler, and have still not received
it. Many requests. 3. Due to things like the encoding issues, trial and
error with beans and stuff, you lose your fast time to prototype when you
prepare for deployment. In prototype, it just has to work with some test
examples. In deployment, it has to work with whatever your customers are going
to throw at it, and effciently, so that it doesn't peg a cpu, and take down your
servers under load. I find myself spending too many hours wrestling performance
out of witango, when I should be inventing. 4. Code base. Periodically, I see a post on the list,
where is that one blog example? or something like that. Do a google search for
"php blog", or whatever, and look at the tons of examples you have to choose
from. Support? Aside from my unlimited Zend support, there are MANY lists, and
google will be your best friend. When I code in .NET, or VB, or RB, I can get
tons of help and examples from google, nothing on
witango. 5. Developer availability. There are tons of php
developers to choose from out there. BTW, if you are a witango dev and good at
php, send me your resume. Anyway, the hardest issue when looking, was cluster
management, and session tracking in a cluster. Witango does this seamlessly. The
Zend platform was even easier to set up to do this. I have a test cluster of 4
php servers on Fedora core 4, and one zend management server. I can hit my zend
management console, and administer everything, and get excellent status
feedback. Just watch the demo on the zend platform on the
site. Also, on my zend management console, I can change the
php.ini settings on one server, then clone the settings to any or all of the
rest in one step. The dev studio has STEP debugging, code folding,
subversion support, cross platform, yada yada. The Zend platform send events to
your studio for you to fix. Its a great product, can't wait to get it
live. The platform does code optimization, or precompilation.
This is a sort of byte order compilation that precompiles your scripts to get
better performance in looping and such. And for when I really need performance, a fully
optimized and documented java bridge function for running java classes and
beans. In the near future I will be documenting my progress of
switching it all over on my site, at http://www.bighead.net/tools/ I have nothing against .NET, but I find I can develop
much faster, and there is so much good, free/cheap code out there for php so
that you are rarely starting from scratch on a project. Also, I have had some
real world experience with linux vs. windows with performance on the same
hardware. I am loving fedora 4. Anyway, Zend gave me a volume dicount, so only $799/cpu
for my servers, so for 6 servers, and 4 dev studios, I only paid $5691. And I
get unlimited support. And I have been testing it, it is excellent so
far. -- Robert Garcia President - BigHead
Technology VP Application Development -
eventpix.com Magalia, Ca 95954 ph: 530.645.4040 x222 fax:
530.645.4040 On Dec 13, 2005, at 1:37 PM, Wolf, Gene
wrote: I hate asking this
question but most of you have either faced this question from your customers or
management in the past or have addressed it yourselves. I figured I'd go to the
people who know best. I have been strongly
encouraged by my management to look for and train my people in a more mainstream
product. They have been very patient (3 years now) and very pleased with the
productivity that my group can deliver with Witango. However they can't take it
upstairs to corporate. They can't find it in any trades, they can't find mention
of it in any recent reviews, they can't find people who know it locally, etc. It
makes them nervous. Hence the encouragement to move
on. Witango has been a
great tool for me for 10 years. I've been here since the Everyware days. However
I understand management's nervousness. My question is, what mainstream product
comes close to doing what Witango does? We're looking at Visual Studio, Oracle
HTML DB, and some other tools. Some are slicker than Witango in that you can
create templates, etc, but none come close to ease of use.
Anyone have any
suggestion for a migration path? We're a Windows shop currently using MS SQL
Server but transitioning to Oracle. Thanks for any suggestions you can
give. ________________________________________________________________________TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf |
- RE: Witango-Talk: Tough question darwin
- RE: Witango-Talk: Tough question Ben Johansen
- Re: Witango-Talk: Tough question Charles Brown
- Re: Witango-Talk: Tough question Robert Garcia
- Re: Witango-Talk: Tough question Robert Garcia
- Re: Witango-Talk: Tough question Christian Platt
- RE: Witango-Talk: Tough question Robert Shubert
- Re: Witango-Talk: Tough question Stefan Gonick
- RE: Witango-Talk: Tough question Scott Cadillac
- Re: Witango-Talk: Tough question Robert Garcia
- RE: Witango-Talk: Tough question steve
