Trying to pose as J2EE, NET or another megaframework won’t
help the LAMP/friends stack.

That wasn’t what I was suggesting at all. Here’s my sentence as you quoted it:

The real question for me becomes, when will LAMP/friends gain legitimacy
as an “enterprise class” platform and how quickly will that force the
industry to re-evaluate optimal deployment models?

I’m not suggesting (at all) that LAMP/friends need to change to look more like J2EE/.Net, I’m suggesting that the perception of “enterprise class” needs to change. I’m wondering when that will happen. I’ve been watching very closely as the perception has shifted over the past 12 months or so and the trend is only accelerating.

Basically, I’m waiting for the industry to understand the situation as you’ve described it. I’m in no way suggesting that LAMP needs to incorporate the brokeness of existing enterprise platforms. That would be complete folly.

Legitimacy is not what will make Ruby or Python C VM get into that league of “entreprise class” development platform.

They allready are!

They have been playing in that league for a while now, disguised as Jython, bundled as a DLL, hidden inside large data processing centers, etc.

Trying to pose as J2EE, NET or another megaframework won’t help the LAMP/friends stack.

Zope, Ruby on Rail and others failed at that game. Because LAMP/friends don’t need to present a unified “do-all be-all” face to their “entreprise” adopters.

Corporate business, large public agencies and the public adopted the LAMP stack for its diversity … of defacto standard C implementations.

Twenty-four years ago, I was fourteen year old computer freak and at that time C was described as the portable “write once, run everywhere” language of the day, something to use instead of CPU specific assembler.

This has not changed.

Java failed to replace C as the defactor system programming language because it is not a language but a proprietary API (that began as a shameless copy of NextStep’s, may I remind you). Java was an attempt of Sun to suplant the Win32 API from within the browser, later recasted as a replacement of C++ for server and workstation application development.

You were not trolling when you described them as “legacy”. But they will stay around for a long time, pretending to be alive, like the ghost of COBOL, a cold body of millions of lines that nobody want to read again.

LAMP/friends allready made J2EE and NET obsolete.

Yet vendors will sell their scam as long as their customer “don’t get it”.

The shift will come slowly with the multiplication of niche competitors for J2EE and NET, built on the same stack as LAMP but dedicated to a specific field. Smaller frameworks, faster implementation with API more narrowly focused on what actually matters, what sells hardware and software: their applications.

http://coders.meta.net.nz/wordpress/archives/2004/09/20/vms-and-the-opensource-community/

Summary: “Why are the open source community wasting time on VMs when we can use the strength of our source to provide a superior solution?”

Hope to meet you at OSCON next week, Ryan — although now that you’ve been anointed the Server-Side Zeldman, you may be busy!

I have written a long and wordy document about this topic.

Do you have the longer version up on the web somewhere? I’d like to link to it.

I posted the rest of this monster to the main site. See The Dark Horse. — Ryan

There’s actually quite a few case studies on IBM.com about enterprises partnering with IBM and using Linux to solve really hard technical problems, but since it’s not pure LAMP and because it’s a marketing web site, I won’t link to it here (though anyone who’s interested can email me for a link).

Bill, I think I know you well enough to trust your intentions. Feel free to post links to your marketing material if you feel its valuable to the community - I’m not anti-commercial, I’m anti-bullshit/anti-fluff.

And thanks for stopping by.

On that subject, another project to watch, also as a test for uptake: http://www.php-compiler.net/ - basically PHP for .NET. They seem to have done a very convincing job and they do seem to have simulated PHP’s maximum execution time limit.

Some examples:

• It’s my understanding that Google’s essentially created a grid of Linux-based computers to serve up web queries
• I believe Amazon is all-Linux
• IBM (disclaimer: I work there) has had a lot of success moving outsourcing customers on to either: Linux on Blade Servers or virtual Linux on zOS (mainframe) LPARs

There’s actually quite a few case studies on IBM.com about enterprises partnering with IBM and using Linux to solve really hard technical problems, but since it’s not pure LAMP and because it’s a marketing web site, I won’t link to it here (though anyone who’s interested can email me for a link).