Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 12:55:17 +0000 From: Paul Richards <paul@originative.co.uk> To: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> Cc: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>, Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no>, Michael Lucas <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 21st Century Unix - web serving Message-ID: <38D77135.2D13FAF8@originative.co.uk> References: <200003210130.KAA74668@daniel.sobral> <v04210100b4fcc78c7165@[128.113.24.47]> <38D74CB3.DF3AA476@newsguy.com>
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"Daniel C. Sobral" wrote: > > Garance A Drosihn wrote: > > > > I assumed "advanced web serving" means packages like ColdFusion. > > Ignoring the question of whether ColdFusion is really "advanced" or > > not, I do know one department on campus here might be switching from > > NT to FreeBSD if they can run ColdFusion on FreeBSD. I do not have > > much background in web-serving options, but I'm under the impression > > that ColdFusion is available RIGHT NOW for Linux, and I don't know > > how well it would work under FreeBSD. > > Since I don't know what ColdFusion does, I cannot comment on this. Well, it's a bit like ASP or PHP. When I read the article I interpreted "advanced web serving" in the same way, I thought the article actually mentioned Cold Fusion in it somewhere. This is a problem. A lot of web developers use ASP and while PHP offers similar functionality it's not supported in the tools that non-hackers use. Likewise Cold Fusion, whereas Linux has support for both. > > Note that what I'm really hoping here is that someone will pipe up > > and say "Oh, yes, I have no trouble running ColdFusion on FreeBSD", > > which would be encouraging to me... :-) Maybe it can be run under > > linux emulation, but given that all this machine will be doing is > > web-serving and ColdFusion, then there seems little point in using > > FreeBSD if the only way to run ColdFusion is via linux emulation. > > Not Linux "emulation". There is _no_ emulation done. It's plain ABI > compatibility. We just "run" the Linux stuff. > > Now, you think there is little point, but, as a matter of fact, there > is. FreeBSD has advantages over Linux. Some claim a faster IP stack, and > I'd be really amazed if our SCSI stuff didn't leave Linux SCSI way > behind for anything but the simpler configurations, for instance. But > more important, in my opinion, is FreeBSD ability to handle *LOAD*. You > know, when you just have been slashdotted and get a sudden peak of > access way above the normal? Well, FreeBSD handles it. It doesn't do any > H0H0 magic or anything, it crawls as you would expect it to, but it > _continues to work_. That's not the case with Linux. With Linux, you get > into a trashing situation, where useful work simply ceases until the > peak is gone. I obviously don't disagree with any of that but I'm a lot more wary of paying out large sums of money for commercial Linux packages in order to run them on FreeBSD. The cost is a large factor, I'm not going to spend the big sums of money necessary to pay for Oracle, for instance, when I know there'll be no support for me should it not work. The other big problem is that when you are using Linux development applications, such as Oracle or Cold Fusion or ASP, then you are stuck in the Linux environment. e,g. you can't write FreeBSD OCI code, you have to write a Linux application. Given all those hassles, it's not as easy as it sounds to use FreeBSD as an "advanced web server" if what you define that to be is using commercial web tools. Now, you can of course use PHP and one of the open source databases but that's a different issue and one that requires winning over the web developers themselves to using the open source tools. The problem of course is that the tools don't really exist and web developers don't really like working in vi :-) Paul. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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