John, I am Pro-Upgrade.
First off, as a dedicated Witango hosting provider, I know what kinds of issues you face when dealing with that many sites. There are many differences between T2K and W55, all of them good, in my opinion. First off, W55 is the most capable/powerful/stable version of Tango/Witango to ever exist. It uses the latest compilers, and integrates well with the latest software and protocols. This can, however, be a double edged sword. If you have a requirement using circa 2000 software, you might have problems due to library incompatibilities. The COM interface is most notable for this. The next point I would make is that there is no corporate license any more. Those licenses were upgraded to 3 professional licenses. I don't know if you'll need that many, and depending on your hardware and/or load, 1 professional or 2 standard licenses may be enough. Still, if you find value and profit in using Witango, then I vote to give a little back to the company we all depend on. Upgrading serves both the developer and the user. There is also a migration issue. There are about 5 things which operate differently between the versions. The default default scope is different (user vs. request), the encoding attribute now has different values/meanings, the syntax for callmethod has changed slightly, and I'm sure there are a few others I'm missing. All of this means that a procedure for finding/replacing bits of code and/or otherwise updating each of your TAF/TCF/TML files will need to be established. Once you get the process down it's not too bad. I've had clients convert large sites in a day with very little debugging to do afterwards. Lastly, I want to point out that the server runs very differently. The threading model is much improved and the speed of the server is much better than T2K. Also, the data source system, the variable store system and the file cache have all been reworked. The last with a significant improvement: you can now purge files from the application and include caches based on domain, this can be very helpful in some cases. W55 is a very different animal than T2K. At the most basic level, since the file format hasn't changed, they are quite code compatible, but that's about where the similarities end. W55 is a true server application, what T2K should've been 5 years ago, and it's hard to find fault with its operation. Even if you forgo the upgrade to 6.0, your W55 licenses should server you until 2010. Consider that in your ROI calculations. Robert Tronics -----Original Message----- From: John Muldoon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 11:18 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Witango-Talk: Upgrading Questions Any other comments please? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 9:20 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Witango-Talk: Upgrading Questions Hi, John. First of all let's clarify what exactly are you going to migrate to and from (O/S and AppServer Versions). The obvious difference between Tango2000 and Witango5 was the Default User Scope in Witango Config. For some of the older applications we had to force to 'user', instead of Witango native 'request'. Migrating from all-in-one box setup to a tiered environment involved changing push/pull mode for Witango. Developers should know what I'm talking about. Another point to pay attention to would be the load, on your Tango Driven web sites. if you approach a threshold of 200 simultaneous users per Witango Daemon, you might face unpleasant preformance issues up to a complete crash. That very much depends on Complexity of the Application Code of course. The AppServer begins to spawn multiple ODBC Connections, while failing to close them. At certain point the Server gets frozen, only kill and restart can help to recover. There's unproven statements that in regards of ODBC issues Windows 2000 SP3 is the most stable configuration for Witango 5 (Most stable version of MDAC). We don't have a way to disprove this, since our web farm is completely Windows2003 based. And it is prone to ODBC SPAWN issue under huge traffic spikes. The only way we found so far to combat this issue is Load Splitting, which is getting less effective as we grow. I would strongly suggest to do a site by site migration. Migrate and test, let it run, see if any issues come up. Add one more and test again. Always plan for roll back. 50 sites might be very hard to find a bug in such a big pile. Good luck. Andre Rekhtine, Sr. IS Consultant, MCSE Moveable Online Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Hello folks, > > I am in the process of moving my sites (50 of them) along with email > servers, dbs, etc., to a new location. I have brand new in-the-box > servers all loaded with Win2k server software. I know, I know, but I > love win2k, very stable platform. I currently loaded Witango 2000 and > moved 6 of the sites over last night. I am seriously considering > upgrading. I really haven't been paying much attention to the caveats > that others have run into. Is an upgrade fairly straightforward? Any > problems running new versions on win2k? Another problem I have is that > I want to run Witango on 2 boxes. I currently have the corporate > version (paid dearly for it) and that allows me the ability to load > Witango on as many boxes as I want. I see the licensing has changed > and was wondering if others are running multiple instances and whether > they got a break on the price. If worse comes to worse, I suppose I > could continue to run 2000 on one of the boxes. Not sure if that is > allowed, but as far as I can tell, I gotta pay full pop anyway. > > I have always been a "don't fix if it ain't broke" type of guy. The > version of Witango and Win2k have been rock solid for the past 6 years > and I am apprehensive about upgrading. I have thousands of taf files > and I need to make sure that this is going to work out for me. > > Any suggestions, things to look for or other information would be > appreciated. > > Thanks! > > ______________________________________________________________________ > __ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf
