hi, Them main problem with these things is that they does not really interact with the operating system they're using. They tend to create world on their own and do not honour things common in host operating system.
Using Windows logic, program files should be somewhere, per-user settings and data somewhere etc. The system architecture is based on this. The security is set up the proper way. When I create new user, it creates its data folder and sets the permission correctly. If I delete the profile, it deletes all. If some software has its own logic in this, it leads to problems, because the above does not work. For example Perl is placing everything in C:\Perl, totally ignoring the folder architecture of host operating system. As a system administrator, I do not want to read thousands of lines of C source code. I want to *use* the software, not write it. I do not even *want* the source code, why? As admin, I expect that the software would interact with standard Windows tools. For example I want application to write their events to appropriate event log. Why? Because I have tools able to analyze the logs, access it remotely and alert me when something happens. When the application does not use the event log and is using its own methods, I am not able to use the common infrastructure. Or I want the application (if applicable) to have performance counters, so I can use the performance monitor (and associated technologies such as WMI) to access and analyze these data. Again: There is some existing infrastructure to monitor processes via perfmon, I can simply connect to. What I want is the application to honour "common courtesy" of host operating system. I do not know Unix-like OSes, but I expect that they have such things like the obvious location of log files, performance data etc. Windows has those things too. Different. Those things, who make their own, isolated worlds, are not simple to monitor, backup and manage, especially for users who are not familiar with the environment from other systems. This is also the main source with problems with XMail. I spend few hours on one firewalled server until I discovered that XMail is not using standard DNS resolution as all application and therefore does not use the DNS servers set as system level. Of course, it is possible to solve this - just read documentation or source code. But I instinctively expect that when *all* applications are using the DNS and it's working, there should not be a problem. I am trying to avoid these application on my systems. In few exceptions (like XMail) with deep sight I am using them. Because there is no good alternative for me, and because in such case the pros are higher than cons. But I definitely do not want more of that applications, and would try to avoid them as much as possible. And for the production environment: Amazon, who are you mentioning, is not running on Windows. Again: I have *nothing* against Perl or so. I think that Perl is probably the best way how to achieve certain things on Unix-like OS. I agree that there probably is lot of big sites who are running Perl applications on Unix. But for Windows is alien from other world. So again: There is no significant number of projects using such techologies as Perl and PHP on Windows in production. As well as there is no significant number of project using in production runtimes for Windows things like ASP or VBScript for Unixes. And, to your original question: It does not matter what language the application uses, as long as the application honours the "common courtesy" of OS. Has consistent UI (if any), data storage, performance monitoring and so on. I think that Unix-like OS has its own logic. Maybe there is some way how to run my applications under some .NET runtime under Linux, for example. But as the application is written mainly for Windows, it would not honour the Linux logic. Partly because I don't know it and partly because it means writing two separate applications. You may thing that I am or drugs, or something like you wrote before. But I just want applications to behave in ways common for and expected in the environment they are running. -- Michal Altair Valasek [EMAIL PROTECTED] Altair Communications - web hosting, web design, application development ___________________________________________________________________________ http://www.altaircom.net | PGP: 0xC4F3579D | Phone (support): +420602137341 When it's inevitable, relax and enjoy it. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe xmail" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For general help: send the line "help" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
