All 1 entries tagged Aspnet

The future of MS in the SME…

My grand plan has been to write a nice web based accounting package that’s simple to use and effectively can replace my use of Microsoft Money. All it needs do is track the accounts and also on-line updates and share pricing would be handy too. It also needs to work from any computer, no matter what it is running. Sure, Flash is on most computers around the world but really it should be a nice combination of AJAX and a suitable back end. Immediately half the world is thinking PHP/MySQL sounds ideal for this kind of use. It’s no surprise that this combination has caught on being relatively simple to learn and quick. In general though PHP is coded with the Business Logic and the Presentation Layer in the same files. Basically having ruled out PHP for this purpose, that leaves me with the choice of ASP.NET or Java (Built on J2EE & EJB 3.0). The chosen solution also has to tie in with my intentions to have a Content Management System, Online Photo Album/Media server and calendaring.

Since I’m a bit of a geek and like my Mac as well as Windows, I thought I’d give the Java solution the shot first. I could use MySQL to host the database and TomCat to do the serving, the only thing being that TomCat doesn’t support EJB 3.0. It has never been in my nature to use something older when a newer shinier toy is on the market so I set about looking for alternates. At work we have a sizeable amount of WebLogic servers and Oracle databases. As it happens I’ve spent most of the weekend playing working to get Oracle 11g running. I have a MacBook Pro with too much Ram and VMWare Fusion, and the experiences were… varied.

Looking at Weblogic first, this is really rather impressive. Using an on-line guide I was able to get Weblogic up and running on Mac OS.X, an unsupported platform but as it’s Unix and Weblogic is at heart a Java program, it worked successfully. Next point to mention is that Weblogic is FAST, scary fast. On the same hardware running a sample Java app (Alfresco) the Weblogic server Alfesco instance was many times quicker to respond than the version hosted on Tomcat. Both were using the default HSQL database too. I can’t quantify the measurement, but everything just moved quicker with less stutters. Score one for Oracle/BEA on that. The only issue I have is when shutting down WebLogic my memory use stays high for a long time after.

I didn’t fancy trying to install Oracle 11g on OS.X too because it’s not a Java app it’s a proper hardcore database, possibly THE hardcore database right now. OK, yes I know DB2 hosts a lot of OLTP databases too and MS SQL Server is also in the market at the lower end but Oracle has held the majority of the mid-range/top-end market for a long time. My first inclination was Sun Solaris 10 but unfortunately Oracle 11gis not supported on Solaris unless you have SPARC processors. Nice and meaty but I have an X86_64 architecture. That meant Linux. I’ve never been a big fan of Linux so far in life. My main issue with it is that there are just so many different distributions it’s almost impossible to pick one that “should work” with everything you want to throw at it. If your intended use is LAMP then it will work beautifully. Likewise if you want to serve files off it, no problem at all. The established components work very well. When it comes to administration though, you’d better be liking your Terminal windows though. Just about all my Administration experience is on Windows, with a smattering of OS.X too. But as Clarkson says ‘how hard can it be?’. Well very as it happens. I picked a distro of Linux. I wanted Red Hat being the biggest player, but you have to pay for that, so I went for the next best thing – Oracle Enterprise Linux. In other words Red Hat with a different badge. The install is quick and painless (remember to install the developer tools to allow compiling of VMWare Tools) and I was fairly confident up to this point. Then I started to run 11g setup. This was less exciting as an experience. Doing the sensible novice thing, I accepted all the defaults, confident in the knowledge that Oracle know a lot more about their product that I do. First time around I hit an error, my chosen user was not in the sudoers file and therefore I couldn’t sudo some of the install scripts. Logging in as root and attempting to add myself using visudo was an experience of a lifetime. Easy to get in, not a clue how to save and exit after. visudo appears to work differently to pico and has no helpful hints. Using su to temporarily become root and run the scripts, I completed the setup. Boldly pointing my browser at the address given, I attempted to log in to the Oracle Administrator interface. This is given as https://localhost.localdomain:1158/em/ and a very nice link it is too. Except if you leave out the s in https then you get it wanting to download a binary in Firefox, that doesn’t work well. When you don’t spot this you make things even harder for yourself. When you restart Linux you now have to work out how the hell to get the instance running again. This in itself can be something of a challenge and to be honest I’ve spent a good few hours looking for how to do this. (Script here)

This brings me nicely round to just why for the foreseeable future, Microsoft will continue to be dominant in the SME. It’s pretty much a given that any company will have a majority of Windows Desktop machines. There may be a few Macs in there, maybe even a few Sun or Linux boxes, but without fail the overwhelming majority in business today will be Windows. The biggest thing that today has brought out for me is just how complete and cohesive the MS Solutions are. Large companies, the ones that use Oracle, Weblogic and Solaris etc pay people to admin such programs. They most likely have dedicated Oracle Database admins who know almost nothing about say Active Directory but everything about how to keep Oracle performing at its best. When you’re a small company you don’t have an army of specialists. Usually the IT support starts with the one person that ‘knows a bit’ and grows from there. When you’re trying to do a day job, ease of use is everything and while the command line offers you ‘ultimate control’, it’s just not as friendly as a nice GUI. So why should an SME bother to learn Oracle/Weblogic/*NIX when they have a perfectly function Windows network anyway? This is why MS remain and will remain dominant here. If you already admin a small network with Active Directory, it’s not too much of a step to bring Exchange on board for your email and Calendaring. Yes it’s complex and you won’t get the best out of it like an Exchange admin would, but for your SME you don’t need that last 20% of performance either. Then you need a database, why learn another when SQL Server is available and works almost the same as Windows in terms of how the commands operate? Lastly you need a decent snappy server to serve a proper Web App. Chances are you’ll be able to find equivalent apps based on ASP.NET and Java at this level, so why bother to spend thousands on Weblogic or Websphere when you have IIS already. When it comes to patching, updating and protecting such setups too, MS can centralise all that under one roof, rather than checking one place to keep your mail servers patched, another for your database and more for your software.

Someone that wants to play will willingly learn how to make the heavy iron programs work in a semi-skilled way. Microsoft Server technologies make it possible to get there one heck of a lot faster though, and with a less steep learning curve. If you’re a FTSE 100 company then the performance and results you’ll get from the heavy iron architecture is worth every penny, to the SME though, there is little compelling reason to move to the higher end technologies. As SQL Server moves to version 2008 too, there is even less reason to move on as it comes ever closer to the Oracle feature set. If I was Oracle I’d start being a little worried about my market share vs my cost of ownership to some extent. Companies growing organically with an SQL Sever base are going to be less likely to move to Oracle for larger installs in future, simply because the time and investment is not going to provide the benefit. Of course, what do I know really? I’m just an amateur playing with professional tools… kind of like the IT department in most small companies.

As for me? Well I’m going to spend another day or so playing with Oracle, then I may well end up with an ASP.NET solution. Heck it might even be marketable as a package as all people would need is SQL Express (free), IIS (free with Windows XP Pro and better) and that’s it – one simple server.

Christopher Hinds : 21 Sep 2008 22:42 |  Tags: Apple Aspnet Database Java Linux Microsoft Oracle Solaris Sql Sun |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem