Re: Witango-Talk: Tough question

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 15:04:05 -0800

Take a look at Zend/PHP. Pay special attention to the Zend Platform.

I haven't posted it yet, but I have decided to completely move off of the witango platform for many reasons, and we have just purchased our licenses for Zend.

Why PHP over others?

First, I wouldn't have chosen php on its own, it was the zend package that made it the witango killer for me. Only $999 per cpu per year, with unlimited support. This have been my main beef with Witango. The support, IMHO, has a lot to be desired. I am tired of asking for left out documentation, and dealing with many bugs, especially in the studio.

Witango has always had one great benefit, its fast to get to prototype. But this is completely negated by a couple of factors.

1. Too many bugs in the studio that cuz workarounds, rebuilding actions, crashing, taking more time than you desire. Especially the !CST bug on the mac. I have to check each taf in a text editor, and fix manually many times.

2. Text encoding issues, and other undocumented problems. For instance, witango most of the time expects ISO-8859-1 and outputs it, but not always, and the only way to find out, is tear your hair out trial and error. I have asked for help/documentation, but apparently I don't own enough servers, or this isn't considered installation support, so I have to pay $1500 support subscription, to get it. One issue that took me many hours to get right, was that when you send text through a bean, Witango expects ASCII coming out, and converts it to ISO. This was very hard to detect. If I sent out ISO from the bean, it didn't work, and if I sent ascii, and then looked for ascii, it didn't work, but if I sent out ASCII from the bean, and then treated the witango text from the bean as ISO, it worked. I have asked Witango Inc, for 2.5+ years to provide documentation on the beanhandler, and have still not received it. Many requests.

3. Due to things like the encoding issues, trial and error with beans and stuff, you lose your fast time to prototype when you prepare for deployment. In prototype, it just has to work with some test examples. In deployment, it has to work with whatever your customers are going to throw at it, and effciently, so that it doesn't peg a cpu, and take down your servers under load. I find myself spending too many hours wrestling performance out of witango, when I should be inventing.

4. Code base. Periodically, I see a post on the list, where is that one blog example? or something like that. Do a google search for "php blog", or whatever, and look at the tons of examples you have to choose from. Support? Aside from my unlimited Zend support, there are MANY lists, and google will be your best friend. When I code in .NET, or VB, or RB, I can get tons of help and examples from google, nothing on witango.

5. Developer availability. There are tons of php developers to choose from out there. BTW, if you are a witango dev and good at php, send me your resume.

Anyway, the hardest issue when looking, was cluster management, and session tracking in a cluster. Witango does this seamlessly. The Zend platform was even easier to set up to do this. I have a test cluster of 4 php servers on Fedora core 4, and one zend management server. I can hit my zend management console, and administer everything, and get excellent status feedback. Just watch the demo on the zend platform on the site.

Also, on my zend management console, I can change the php.ini settings on one server, then clone the settings to any or all of the rest in one step.

The dev studio has STEP debugging, code folding, subversion support, cross platform, yada yada. The Zend platform send events to your studio for you to fix. Its a great product, can't wait to get it live.

The platform does code optimization, or precompilation. This is a sort of byte order compilation that precompiles your scripts to get better performance in looping and such.

And for when I really need performance, a fully optimized and documented java bridge function for running java classes and beans.

In the near future I will be documenting my progress of switching it all over on my site, at http://www.bighead.net/tools/

I have nothing against .NET, but I find I can develop much faster, and there is so much good, free/cheap code out there for php so that you are rarely starting from scratch on a project. Also, I have had some real world experience with linux vs. windows with performance on the same hardware. I am loving fedora 4.

Anyway, Zend gave me a volume dicount, so only $799/cpu for my servers, so for 6 servers, and 4 dev studios, I only paid $5691. And I get unlimited support. And I have been testing it, it is excellent so far.

-- 

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 Dec 13, 2005, at 1:37 PM, Wolf, Gene wrote:

   I hate asking this question but most of you have either faced this question from your customers or management in the past or have addressed it yourselves. I figured I'd go to the people who know best.

   I have been strongly encouraged by my management to look for and train my people in a more mainstream product. They have been very patient (3 years now) and very pleased with the productivity that my group can deliver with Witango. However they can't take it upstairs to corporate. They can't find it in any trades, they can't find mention of it in any recent reviews, they can't find people who know it locally, etc. It makes them nervous. Hence the encouragement to move on.

   Witango has been a great tool for me for 10 years. I've been here since the Everyware days. However I understand management's nervousness. My question is, what mainstream product comes close to doing what Witango does? We're looking at Visual Studio, Oracle HTML DB, and some other tools. Some are slicker than Witango in that you can create templates, etc, but none come close to ease of use.

   Anyone have any suggestion for a migration path? We're a Windows shop currently using MS SQL Server but transitioning to Oracle. Thanks for any suggestions you can give.


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