Musings on our technological world
Rants, Postulations, Opinions, Commentaries, or just plain noise on the computer orientated and technological world we are increasingly living in.
From AI to advertising to scientific reasoning and bias, anything that takes my fancy really.
Monday 11 December 2006, 7:41 PM
LAMP vs WISA
For those that have no idea what I'm on about, it's the open-source / commercial competition between LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) and WISA (Windows-IIS-SQL Server-ASP), and what is the most appropriate. And yes, I know that P can be Perl as well, but PHP I see as a closer match with ASP, so there.
I've seen this argument in a number of places on the web, and most (not all) seem to be on the side of LAMP is wonderful and free, WISA is evil and expensive, and I simply cannot agree. Sure, if you are implementing WISA on your own corporate network, you are looking at potentially expensive license costs -- SQL Server is notoriously expensive (albeit powerful). However, under the basis you already have a Windows computer, particularly a Windows server, IIS and ASP are free and require very little configuration to have fully working. If you don't have SQL in your company anyway, WIMA (same but with MySQL) is a very quick and easy alternative, and then you have the (effectively) free solution again.
Go back 5 years and most web hosts offered Linux web hosting, and with that you got no IIS and ASP anyway (I don't think Linux _could_ support ASP until very recently, and IIS is part of the Windows OS), so you were left without little choice. I reckon this is the real reason that LAMP is so widely praised - people are simply used to it, and most free web apps in community projects are written in PHP (largely for the same reasons). In the last few years I have switched over to Windows hosting, and started playing around with ASP - I have to admit, it's a walk in the park compared with PHP; I like the easy to read syntax, it's like writing rather odd English. The performance seems extremely similar, and it's a damn sight easier IMHO to look at someone else's code and know what you are seeing at first glance.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with LAMP. I like its open free status, I like the large community of support and large number of applications that other people have written for it. However, in the current age of Windows servers everywhere and free MySQL or SQL Server databases online, I would never hesitate in first recommending people start with ASP, especially for intranet work and simple but db-functional websites.
However, it needs us technophiles to jump on the "let's build a community" bandwagon to get the same level of feature rich, freely available open source ASP software into the market so that it can be recognised. So this seems as good an opportunity as any to shamelessly plug my (currently pre-alpha) ordering system SBOMPS.
SBOMPS stands for Small Business Office Management and Processing System, and is intended for small companies that operate by buying (from suppliers) and selling (to customers) products, and is designed by default to work with both SQL Server and MySQL, and be compatible with IE (6.1 and 7.0 tested) and Firefox (1.5.0.1 onwards tested).
If you have any comments on either my post or the software, I'd love to hear about them!
I've seen this argument in a number of places on the web, and most (not all) seem to be on the side of LAMP is wonderful and free, WISA is evil and expensive, and I simply cannot agree. Sure, if you are implementing WISA on your own corporate network, you are looking at potentially expensive license costs -- SQL Server is notoriously expensive (albeit powerful). However, under the basis you already have a Windows computer, particularly a Windows server, IIS and ASP are free and require very little configuration to have fully working. If you don't have SQL in your company anyway, WIMA (same but with MySQL) is a very quick and easy alternative, and then you have the (effectively) free solution again.
Go back 5 years and most web hosts offered Linux web hosting, and with that you got no IIS and ASP anyway (I don't think Linux _could_ support ASP until very recently, and IIS is part of the Windows OS), so you were left without little choice. I reckon this is the real reason that LAMP is so widely praised - people are simply used to it, and most free web apps in community projects are written in PHP (largely for the same reasons). In the last few years I have switched over to Windows hosting, and started playing around with ASP - I have to admit, it's a walk in the park compared with PHP; I like the easy to read syntax, it's like writing rather odd English. The performance seems extremely similar, and it's a damn sight easier IMHO to look at someone else's code and know what you are seeing at first glance.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with LAMP. I like its open free status, I like the large community of support and large number of applications that other people have written for it. However, in the current age of Windows servers everywhere and free MySQL or SQL Server databases online, I would never hesitate in first recommending people start with ASP, especially for intranet work and simple but db-functional websites.
However, it needs us technophiles to jump on the "let's build a community" bandwagon to get the same level of feature rich, freely available open source ASP software into the market so that it can be recognised. So this seems as good an opportunity as any to shamelessly plug my (currently pre-alpha) ordering system SBOMPS.
SBOMPS stands for Small Business Office Management and Processing System, and is intended for small companies that operate by buying (from suppliers) and selling (to customers) products, and is designed by default to work with both SQL Server and MySQL, and be compatible with IE (6.1 and 7.0 tested) and Firefox (1.5.0.1 onwards tested).
If you have any comments on either my post or the software, I'd love to hear about them!
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