Deployment on NT (Intel), Solaris and HP-UX are available and fully supported under WO
4.0. The only platform that has been lost between 3.5 and 4.0 has been Mach based
Intel (yes, that is annoying). We have a number of customers that are quite
successfully deploying on Solaris right now.
WO isn't really priced out of the market-- doing a price comparison against other
products that claim to be in the same league (ASP, as delivered with NT server is
*not* in the same league and not marketed as such-- to go there, you have to buy lots
of extras and/or spend lots of money on Microsoft service providers) reveals that
WebObjects has a similar price
structure to most of the rest of the products.
Cost of *development* is an entirely different issue. A properly run-- with emphasis
on properly-- WO based project will generally cost less than other tools. Why?
Because WO is a mature product and, as such, it is possible to build production
schedules and cost estimates that are accurate. Not so with other similar
products... the combination of their
immaturity and that most are built on top of emerging technologies (Java and related,
generally) yields a development environment where it is nearly impossible to quantify
how much time/money will be invested in dealing with various random brokeness in the
development environment.
I find it amusing to run across various folks that blame WebObjects, ASP, Dynamo or
any of a number of other technologies for all their monetary and timeline woes when
the reality is that they haven't applied any kind of a real world process to
product/solution realization!
Even more amusing are the folks that moan about the cost of licensing for any of these
tools and never once mention that they:
- had to spend an extra $50,000 to $100,000 on hardware to handle the extra load
caused by poorly engineered software that is ridiculously ineffecient
- went 30% to %250 over budget because they:
- never had a specification that anyone signed off on or stuck too
- changed business model half way through the project
- constantly change "minor pieces" of the UI (moving a tool bar, rearranging
forms, etc... things that are easy in an HTML editor but translate to massive logic
changes in how the UI works)
- never once considered the details of deployment, staging, or ongoing maintenance
- never considered that bug/issue resolution after deployment
- scheduled development up until the day of deployment with no q/a period-- then
wonder why they are doing emergency bugfix rollouts every day (including weekends) for
the three weeks after the initial rollout
- had to hire new engineering staff because they burned out the old ones with
completely unquantified and totally ridiculous expectations which resulted in the
staff attempting to maintain 20 hour days for weeks on end only to result in the staff
burning out, spending numerous days out sick due to negative health impacts, etc...
The above seems to be the standard-operating-procedure for *most* of the projects in
the Internet/Intranet business. This is a ridiculous state of affairs. Yet, I see
little evidence that the decision makers are actually *learning* from the incredibly
flame outs that happen time and again.
b.bum
David Fleskes wrote:
> I agree... priced right out of the market. Hmm, what more can be done to lose
>market share?
>
> How about the genious marketing strategy regarding the locking WO apps out of the
>Intel hardware. Or, maybe everyone is just going to go out and buy all new G3 boxes?
> I would think the lesson of trying to leverage hardware with software would have
>been learned a few times already. At least provide the deployment version of WO on
>the Solaris/Intel platform.
>
> ------------------
> David Fleskes
