[Gllug] OT(ish): Advice

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 01:27, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> Is there any actual reason why I should choose to run server side
> software on my web server, where I control the platform, in an emulated
> environment guaranteed to slow everything to a crawl? Is there any sane
> reason to choose Java over, well, *anything* else that's not running in
> a JVM? I'm genuinely curious as to why so many people seem to have
> bought into servlets, and I can only currently rationalize by assuming
> that Intel are brainwashing people......

The best reason there is: buzzword-compliance. :)

The more buzzwords you have in your platform, the more money you will
get for it.  Simple as that.

A few years ago, I made a web IPO app (Cazenove* no less) and in the
prep work sent them an architecture spec.  They sent it back saying it
basically didn't have enough buzzwords.  So I redesigned it using EJBs
and XML and made sure to mention that Oracle would be the database
backend.  They liked this, but it...

1. was much harder to develop and debug.
2. was *extremely* memory and cpu intensive, even with only one client
connected and oracle on a seperate server!
3. since we were using EJBs (for scalability :) the xml stuff had to be
serialised ON EVERY BLOODY METHOD CALL!

After 5 people had been working this for about 6 months, I spent about a
week doing it again in php using xmldb (http://pdr.cx/projects/xmldb/)
with the same database schema and it was about 1000 times faster.  But
there was no way a C/php/postgresql solution was going to sell (back
then at least).

Fortunately, Cazenove are so leet that they only have about 50 clients
(each dealing in millions of pounds though), so the speed wasn't an
issue.

Pete

* Cazenove is a broker to high-profile investors (and even the Queen
herself)

-- 
Pete Ryland
http://pdr.cx/
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