At 11:41 AM 10/16/02 -0700, Wendy Smoak wrote: >When it's finally finished, it needs to live on a "real" webserver.
Fortunately, the platform choices at your disposal are remarkably varied, and most of them are better than HP-UX! >Currently, that's an HP-UX 11 box running HP's version of Apache 2.0/Tomcat >3.3. That's not going to work... I need JSP 1.2 and Servlet 2.3 support. Argh! The difficulty with the HP-UX platform (among other things) is that it's most certainly not in the first 'round' of development for things Java. Where Solaris is the 'reference' platform, Linux and Windoze seem to be just about as well-supported. The effort goes where the demand is. So does the support. HP-UX is in that group of hind-enders that get there at some point along the way. Depending upon HP to get things up to snuff is a bad business. Their OS groups are a bit of a shambles, not seeming to have any clear direction that lasts more than six weeks before the 'next great thing that is top priority' comes along. Add to that that nothing ever seems to get done quickly and efficiently at HP, because 'The HP Way' doesn't allow that to happen, and you can figure that you'll be safely off the leading edge. >I'm not the sysadmin, but typically we seem to stick to installing things >that come directly from HP. I'm not clear on all the reasons, but >apparently HP-UX is sufficiently "different" from other Unixes that things >don't transfer well. (??) Well, there is a strong 'brand loyalty' among the PA-RISC community to HP-UX. It's certainly for marketing or 'IT shop stability' reasons, because the technical beauty and even robustness of HP-UX is pretty questionable. Speaking as someone who had the fortune (or misfortune) of being a kernel developer on HP-UX 9 through 11, I have to say that the conglomeration of baling-wire and duct tape code that is HP-UX is about as ugly as the string of business failures that are on Carly Fiorina's *curriculum vitae*. That's not likely to get much better IMHO, now that HP has flushed one of their key HP-UX development laboratories (Florham Park, NJ) together with 90% of the engineers (who were *mostly* from the team that invented System 5 at Bell Labs) right down the toilet. (And yes, I was on that team, but no, I got out a couple of years before it got Fiorina'd.) >Does anyone have any words of wisdom for me? Is it out of the question to >build Tomcat from the source and then convince the existing Apache webserver >to cooperate with it? I think if you look at it from a dollars-and-sense perspective, and take into consideration all of the hassles and costs of sticking with HP-UX for your webserver in the Java environment, you'll quickly conclude that you'll come out ahead financially by spending some few dollars on a decent Intel box with RedHat or SuSe or Caldera. You'll also get away from the ridiculous situation of developing on Win2K on your desktop because (most likely) you're organization can't afford an over-priced PA-RISC machine as a development platform. Any old semi-retired workstation can have a copy of everything you need on it, running Linux, and it will happily sit under your desk on a KVM switch and allow you develop right there on the same type of platform on which you'll deploy. Oh yes, I know Java is 'write once, run anywhere' but you can either keep trying to prove that true or just write it in the run-time environment without testing the idealism. The cost of a Linux server is probably less than 1 day of your time wasted in going round and round trying to make it work on a platform which is going (IMHO) to be further marginalized as its HP continues to thrash about trying to figure out what to do with HP-UX. Even if ALL you do is the JSP/J2EE stuff on that machine for now, it's a good start in having a fall-back plan in case (or until) HP-UX dies the death that it so richly deserves. Of course, you may work in one of those organizations that doesn't count your time as being a valuable asset that can only be spent once, but that's another story... :-) Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
