Re: Witango-Talk: .NET vs Witango vs. Oracle

Fri, 20 May 2005 08:32:13 -0700

I know, the most frustrating part, is that you want nothing more than to keep using witango.

The main thing for me, is not just that no one knows about it anymore, that has been the case since before With picked it up. The problem is for me, that in the last yearish, I think things have gotten significantly worse. Thinking about the response from Phil:

"Because no one has heard of it" is such a bizzare argument.� Yes people use it all the time but in my experience it is not the reason for making a decision.� It is just a convenient argument that is hard to rebuke so you need to have a strategy ready for when it comes up.

Every new client anyone gets has not heard of them until they are introduced to them for the first time by somebody, but their intelligence and reasoning power manages to kick in and they get past it.� You need to sell your own Company to get the work, so why is the software tools you use any different.� Sell it as you would your own skills.� The IT industry has matured a lot since the days of FUD and hype.��Start making the argument about deliverables, cost of delivery, cost of ownership, meeting deadlines, risk management, code consistency, etc and stop the argument being about technology.� Make it about how you will perform the task.��If they want the "name brand technology" or Standards based solution then you can offer them J2EE.��The Witango Java Framework and compiler were developed for this reason.� A few clicks and the application can be deployed to a J2EE server.� You can develop with the Dev Studio and deploy to JBoss, BEA, WebSphere, SUN, etc.� If a company has heard of .Net then they have definitely heard of J2EE.

As I think about this, I disagree more and more. If you were in management, choosing what language your company should go with for mission critical apps, what would you do to make an informed decision? I know that if some guy at BigHead Technology came to me and told me all the great things about witango, that would mean alot, but I would go on the net, and do a little research of my own.

Give it a shot, and tell me if you find what I did. Do some searches for witango, and various keywords on google. You will find very little info compared to other languages, but when you do find witango stuff, you will find sites that are not being kept up, with news from 2002 or 2003 on the front page. Broken links, and MANY sites that don't exist anymore, domains for sale, distributors that have closed up shop, training schedules that don't have any classes anymore. I am not making this up, do it for yourself. All the places that several people, including myself (www.theradmac.com) are either abandoned, or gone. Even the ones that look like they are being kept up, like webenergy, most of the sections say, under construction. I even went to one of the old standards, my google search of "witango developers" pulled up Scott Caddillac's site at�http://xmlx.ca/ , I couldn't believe it, it is powered by ASP.net! This used to be a great site of all things witango. I used to go on there and look up his list of witango developed sites to see if he got mine on there. I can't even find that list anymore. And the only witango stuff is 2 years old. His site looks like all things .NET now.

I feel like I have been busy working for a while, and now I am taking inventory, and where the hell did everyone go? I feel much worse about this issue then I did when I started it.

(PLEASE NOTE: I mean no ill will or offense to any of the people responsible for these sites. I pulled my site down also, due to lack of response, and I couldn't justify the time, and due to moving my family across state.)

And the worst for me, I used to point to the site serverwatch.com for clients, they could go and see a positive review (4+ stars out of 5) for tango/witango. Server watch was one of those places that actually seemed to give Wtiango merit, even though it wasn't the most popular. However, if you read the review now, it is a 2+ star review and if you read it, it is pretty much saying the same thing. It says the witango dev community seems scarce, and ends with the question "Why Witango?"


So after doing some googling, and reading that, what kind of a decision would you make as an IT decision maker?

I can honestly say, I didn't see this review until late last night, after I was looking for some positive info. You see, I have to fly to LA on Tuesday and meet with PeachDirect. They have bought in another developer to quote rewriting the whole thing in .NET. The other team will be there also. I have a great rep with peach at this point, and was looking for some ammo to take with me to help defend the witango decision. After doing a little research myself on the web, I feel I will just look like an idiot with the dev community looking like a ghost town, witangos own developer.witango.com site not working properly, and the only review I can find a bad one, my best argument is I can rewrite it in .NET a lot cheaper/better/faster than any other new developer, cuz I know the code like the back of my hand.

Anyway, I have been really excited about 5.5, so much so that I paid to upgrade my servers, just haven't done the migration just yet. But I have a feeling I won't be doing that. I have a meeting with Adobe again also in a few weeks about eventpix, and the last thing I want is for one of these guys to go and google witango, like I did last night, and find what I found. It looks like witango is going away from the outside eye, not here to stay, and worthy of their confidence. Yet I know it is not, I know that Phil and co. have worked hard on 5.5 and are still working, but it sure doesn't look that way from the outside, and it doesn't seem like anyone is going to try to do anything about it.

--�

Robert Garcia
President - BigHead Technology
VP Application Development - eventpix.com
13653 West Park Dr
Magalia, Ca 95954
ph: 530.645.4040 x222 fax: 530.645.4040

On May 20, 2005, at 7:10 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Please do not get me wrong. Witango is my tool of choice. I love it and try to promote it when I can. But I have lost clients over it, lost bids because of it, but still I hang in there and hope that it will turn around so instead of 4 providers that are found that will take a site, thousands would respond. I wish there was more I could do to help get this product out of the basement and up to par with a lot of the other languages and tools out there. Maybe I could land some more work. and maybe others would be more comfortable about using it if they knew there was a good, large community that supported it.


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