[thelist] What tools should I use?

April april at farstrider.org
Mon Sep 12 11:23:14 CDT 2005


Most of my experience with ASP was 5 years ago, so there might be  big 
disagreement with this email from a more current developer, but here's 
my experience:

The non-open-source approach to web development can get expensive in 
ways you probably haven't even realized yet.  The costs of being a 
Windows developer can be closer to the thousands than the hundreds, 
which can really hurt outside of an established company.  To start with, 
the initial licensing costs to set up a server aren't completely 
trivial.  For example, check out 
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.mspx. I don't run a 
Windows server so I don't know if there's a way around paying $667 to 
have SQL server on your own server, but that page sure looks daunting. 
Also, I think Windows servers need more babysitting in a shared hosting 
environment; getting a shared hosting account is more expensive.

A source of expense for a starting out web developer is when you start 
needing the little pre-made scripts for intermediate and advanced tasks 
like forums, timeclocks, wikis, caching, html email, etc.  You can find 
nearly anything for free, open-source, in PHP compared to only some 
things for .NET.  The price tags on stuff in a development environment 
rarely seems to be 29.99$ as well.  They're more likely to have stuff 
like 89.99$ per website or 400$ for an unlimited license.  Microsoft 
products frequently have free or low cost alternatives, but they always 
have a "gotcha".  For example, Access might seem like a good cheap 
choice, but due to its concurrent connections limits it doesn't seem to 
last long on most websites.

On the other end of that, if you're ever willing to pay thousands of 
dollars for the enterprise edition of some software or another that can 
completely solve some complex problem +make julienne fries for a huge 
corporation, has excellent security, and a sales team that impresses the 
board, it will probably not be on apache, PHP, mysql.  It is more likely 
to be on ASP, .NET, SQL server.  It might not be on either though.  The 
costly apps for ASP are more likely to come with some form of tech 
support, too, which can be very nice at times.

There's also a point in a database driven website's life where it goes 
from being the developers toy to getting a LOT of traffic.  In my 
experience, the website developed on ASP, .NET tends to need its own 
dedicated server earlier than the one on linux, apache, and that 
dedicated server starts to fail the ASP, .NET developer much earlier.  A 
windows platform can be very efficient if done correctly, but I think 
the point where it can be done correctly requires more learning and 
registering of DLLs which gets to be a pain in the bum when leasing from 
a shared hosting providor.

When it comes to job hunting later, you'll discover most companies with 
a one or two person web team seem to run in a Windows environment.  This 
makes it a bit easier to get your first job as an ASP developer.  A 
large part of this is sheer tradition.  Companies making decisions about 
  linux vs windows on their servers are a lot more likely to go with 
linux now than they were 10 years ago (though still not THAT likely). 
Another large part of this is marketing and sales budgets.  The people 
who make decisions in a company about where the money is going have been 
taught by experience that the place with a sales team and a name they 
know is better than something they never heard of advocated by the hippy 
developer (even when it adds a few thousand to the price tag).  This is 
a perfectly valid opinion in most areas of corporate life, but it leaves 
linux and php playing the "no name pet of the developer" due to its 
being open source/free.  This creates a cycle where there are more ASP 
developers running small web teams (since they can get jobs), and when 
they move on to a new project they tend to use ASP since it's what 
they're best at.   Companies with a very large web presence tend to have 
moved back away from Windows + ASP, though.  They might not be on 
apache, either.

I don't think this means that Windows is the road to riches as a 
developer, though.  By the time you can call yourself an expert in 
either ASP or PHP, you'll be able to find a job with PHP and possibly a 
better paying one.  Right now, senior linux system admins and system 
programmers are coming into so much demand I'm not sure that that many 
linux admins with 5 to 10 years experience exist.  I've heard tales 
lately about visible linux administrators getting job offers out of the 
blue in other countries without ever having submitted a resume. 
Governments in countries other than America and a few others are also 
very quick to embrace open source, and php is already the standard 
language of choice in those places.  In 5 or 10 years, I think being 
able to say you're a senior PHP developer will be worth a whole lot.



jcole1513 wrote:
> Hi: 
> I'm pretty new to web development (supporting one website for about a
> year), and would like to know what direction I should take for becoming
> a full-fledged web developer. Specifically, I would like to know what
> are the arguments for using open-source tools (Apache, PHP, MySQL,Linux)
> over, say, Microsoft environment (IIS,ASP,.NET, SQL server). Are there
> any good articles on the pros and cons of one kind of environment over
> another?
>  
> Also, it seems there are some good arguments for Flash over Java, but
> I'd be interested to have that confirmed from some of the veterans out
> there.
>  
> Thanks for any help you can give,
> Jeannie
> jcole1513 at comcast.net
>  
>  



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