Re: WebDNA version?
This WebDNA talk-list message is from 2007
It keeps the original formatting.
numero = 68962
interpreted = N
texte = On 5/4/07 12:48 PM, "Donovan Brooke"
wrote:> Clint has recently posted quite a lot of examples of probably my biggest pet> peeve about, what seems to be synonymous with, main-stream technologies. More> busy work! It's kinda like the PC vs. Mac thing... I guarantee you that if> you have two system administrators, both who manage a multi-server> environment, the PC admin will have much more work to do on a time basis than> the Mac admin. In fact the Mac Admin may very well have to fight for his/her> validity in a department. ;-) ...Same with PHP vs. WebDNA, Constant security> patches, paid upgrades, make PHP more time intensive, thus losing the energy> (costs) to results value.I don't read your comments as any type of personal attack, but I still wantto respond with some reasoning. I'm a Mac guy and always have been. I agreewith the simplicity. I applaud Apple for bringing us the Intel machines thatlet me run OS X full-time while running Window$ XP in a window forcross-platform development testing. I come from a design background, but Imigrated into web development and system administration with lots oftrial-by-fire training.Our company has been developing websites and web-based applications since1998. We originally used Filemaker Pro for some limited database-type stuffsince it was very Mac-friendly. We had our own WebSTAR 2 server to host on,so we had some flexibility there. Then, we moved to WebDNA 3 when our localhosting partner suggested it as another more-powerful, Mac-friendly product.We had moved on to WebSTAR 3 by this time. We eventually moved to WebSTAR 5since it ran under OS X. There were several bulletin boards an other add-onproducts that required CGI or PHP to run. It became an enormous P.I.T.A. totry to get this stuff up and going with WebSTAR, so we bought an Xserve andput iTools on it to host with Apache with providing more flexibility thanApple's Apache GUI.Up until last fall, we were developing on WebDNA exclusively. Our city mayhave had the highest cluster of WebDNA developers at one time, since ourhosting partner had recruited other developers in town to adopt WebDNA also.We had 3 people in-house, and I know of at least 4 other people in the citythat were using it.As requests for additional add-on software increased, it was becoming almostimpossible to integrate with WebDNA. While the RAM-based database system wasfast, we found it to have some stability issues. There were several timesthroughout our WebDNA history that databases were truncated when WebSTAR orApache took a big crap. This has happened as recently as February when welost over 100k records during a server crash.Last Fall, we made the decision to move to PHP/MySQL based on severalfactors:1. We hate Microsoft and didn't want to use .NET.2. PHP has thousands of developers worldwide that can freelance or offerfree code.3. We wanted the reliability of disk-based databases.4. There are countless books, websites, blogs, and usergroups dedicated toPHP.5. Smith Micro completely dropped the ball with WebDNA with their silenceand lack of support. This was the straw that broke the camels back.I have built some extremely feature-rich and complex applications withWebDNA, and I haven't seen any other server-side language that can competewith it's simplicity. With all this being said, I have no regrets in movingto PHP/MySQL. For us, it's been a natural progression. The main-streamnature of PHP has been very beneficial when learning.-------------------------------------------------------------This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list .To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to Web Archive of this list is at: http://webdna.smithmicro.com/
Associated Messages, from the most recent to the oldest:
On 5/4/07 12:48 PM, "Donovan Brooke" wrote:> Clint has recently posted quite a lot of examples of probably my biggest pet> peeve about, what seems to be synonymous with, main-stream technologies. More> busy work! It's kinda like the PC vs. Mac thing... I guarantee you that if> you have two system administrators, both who manage a multi-server> environment, the PC admin will have much more work to do on a time basis than> the Mac admin. In fact the Mac Admin may very well have to fight for his/her> validity in a department. ;-) ...Same with PHP vs. WebDNA, Constant security> patches, paid upgrades, make PHP more time intensive, thus losing the energy> (costs) to results value.I don't read your comments as any type of personal attack, but I still wantto respond with some reasoning. I'm a Mac guy and always have been. I agreewith the simplicity. I applaud Apple for bringing us the Intel machines thatlet me run OS X full-time while running Window$ XP in a window forcross-platform development testing. I come from a design background, but Imigrated into web development and system administration with lots oftrial-by-fire training.Our company has been developing websites and web-based applications since1998. We originally used Filemaker Pro for some limited database-type stuffsince it was very Mac-friendly. We had our own WebSTAR 2 server to host on,so we had some flexibility there. Then, we moved to WebDNA 3 when our localhosting partner suggested it as another more-powerful, Mac-friendly product.We had moved on to WebSTAR 3 by this time. We eventually moved to WebSTAR 5since it ran under OS X. There were several bulletin boards an other add-onproducts that required CGI or PHP to run. It became an enormous P.I.T.A. totry to get this stuff up and going with WebSTAR, so we bought an Xserve andput iTools on it to host with Apache with providing more flexibility thanApple's Apache GUI.Up until last fall, we were developing on WebDNA exclusively. Our city mayhave had the highest cluster of WebDNA developers at one time, since ourhosting partner had recruited other developers in town to adopt WebDNA also.We had 3 people in-house, and I know of at least 4 other people in the citythat were using it.As requests for additional add-on software increased, it was becoming almostimpossible to integrate with WebDNA. While the RAM-based database system wasfast, we found it to have some stability issues. There were several timesthroughout our WebDNA history that databases were truncated when WebSTAR orApache took a big crap. This has happened as recently as February when welost over 100k records during a server crash.Last Fall, we made the decision to move to PHP/MySQL based on severalfactors:1. We hate Microsoft and didn't want to use .NET.2. PHP has thousands of developers worldwide that can freelance or offerfree code.3. We wanted the reliability of disk-based databases.4. There are countless books, websites, blogs, and usergroups dedicated toPHP.5. Smith Micro completely dropped the ball with WebDNA with their silenceand lack of support. This was the straw that broke the camels back.I have built some extremely feature-rich and complex applications withWebDNA, and I haven't seen any other server-side language that can competewith it's simplicity. With all this being said, I have no regrets in movingto PHP/MySQL. For us, it's been a natural progression. The main-streamnature of PHP has been very beneficial when learning.-------------------------------------------------------------This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list .To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to Web Archive of this list is at: http://webdna.smithmicro.com/
Clint Davis
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