Frank Sommers
Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002
|
|
Re: Gosling: Java vs PHP a Moot Debate
|
Posted: Mar 14, 2006 12:04 PM
|
|
> If all he wants is to be is the Java marketing guy who
> used to be techncial, then more power to him. If he wants
> to maintain a reputation as a serious programmer, he needs
> to be less dismissive of reasonable alternatives to Java.
My take on this is that a language/environment needs to suite the development and design style of those working with it. Other than that, most environments can scale up or out - PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java, even VB.
Such scaling all depends on the resources available to those working with an environment. But I suppose those who really need to scale up an application, e.g., to handle large loads, will have some kind of business model that allows them to purchase off-the-shelf tools that let them scale their app. Perhaps Java has more such frameworks and tools than some of the other environments do. That's not really due to Java being superior in some way, but just to the fact that vendors saw opportunities in developing commercial tools that allow scaling, etc. And since Perl, Ruby, etc., tend more towards an open-source culture, whereas Java tends to be at least as commercial/ISV-driven as it is defined by open-source, vendors may have chosen to target Java with their commercial tools. So to say that Java allows you to scale your applications more than other environments do is really just a statement about the Java ecosystem, and not about the technology.
Another note is that it's important to differentiate between degrees of scale, and I don't think that interplanetary navigation is a good benchmark for that. Most open-source/free/community-driven projects don't really need the scale available in some top-end commercial products. (I say most, because some may do.) Postgres or MySQL, and free versions of Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server, for instance, already let you manage tens of gigabytes of data for free. All the open-source Web servers can scale up to tens of millions of request per month, etc.
When you need to go an order of magnitude beyond that, storing, say a terrabyte of data or handling 100s of millions of requests a month, you surely must have some commercial model to support purchasing products that can achieve that scale. Not to mention, at that level, you will have costs beyond software, such as bandwidth, servers, etc. Perhaps Java has more such tools than other environments do, simply because Java was marketed more into the enterprise (thanks in great part to IBM), and enterprises tend to be able to pay vendors for such products.
|
|
Previous Topic
