LAMP Grid Application Server, No More J2EE 615
An anonymous reader writes "Check out this blog entry in Loosely Coupled about ActiveGrid's new open source Grid Application Server based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. Not to start another PHP vs. Java flame war, but it looks like LAMP is starting to grow up, and that it is much better suited for next generation applications than J2EE."
In which world? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell do you base that peice of tripe on? Why lets compare an incomplete system cobled together on top of PHP to a mature Java based solution which is currently being used in hundreds of thousands of enterprise sites daily throughout the world. Yeah, I can see how LAMP just kicks J2EE's ass on that one.
Seriously, overhype much?
Interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
But I guess to each his own. Only time will tell which architecture was worth its own salt.
Meanwhile, I do confess that I have more experience with a LAMP stack, which IMHO is easier to install and develop on.
Your Opinion Will Vary
Let me get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
New /. business model? (Score:4, Insightful)
Get a fucking grip (Score:2, Insightful)
The only thing this indicates to me is that Grid/LAMP is going to struggle to gain acceptance in the enterprise because it proponents are idiots.
I haven't RTFA, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia [uchile.cl]
Re:Where to go ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at O'Reillys "Better, Faster, Lighter Java"
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bfljava/
IMHO Java scales very well, from small prototype projects right up to enterprise level apps. PHP is fine for the smaller stuff but I'd rather poke my eyes out with a white hot needle than develop and enterprise app with it.
LAMP may be fine for web-based applications... (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is no impedance mismatch, everything talks SOAP/HTTP" - well, yes, that's great, but you shouldn't be talking SOAP/HTTP internally. There are faster means of communication, so use them.
"Apparently what is needed is a language/environment that is loosely typed in order to encapsulate XML well and that can efficiently process text" - only on input and output. In intermediary stages, you should be using a much more efficient format. If you're doing something clever, it's going to involve much more than just plain old text.
"J2EE and
RTFA and you'll see that LAMP is being pushed for "text-pumping". Why aren't they saying it's any good for anything else? Because it most likely isn't.
Scripting languages suck (Score:2, Insightful)
But with any scripting language, you have to run the application to catch even trivial bugs like misspelled methods and incorrect argument types.
I'm sure scripting languages have their place, but I've NEVER written a large script, without eventually wishing that I'd originally used a strict language. Scripts are great for fast turnaround, but only if you don't mind chasing trivial bugs that a compiler should have caught. I want a language that's tighter than a straightjacket.
Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Article is Slashdotted, so I can't comment on the content, but just to reply to some of the posts that will defenitely come up, because they ALWAYS come up when Java is discussed-
EJB are bloated etc:
J2EE is does NOT equal Enterprise Javabeans. J2EE contains classes for lots of things. XML processing, messages, web servers, database connectivity, etc. You don't have to use EJB. Lots of Java developers don't like EJB because they are too cumbersome, and there are plenty of alternatives. Check out for instance O'Reillys recent book Better, Faster, Lighter Java [oreilly.com].
Java is slow:
Startup time for the JVM is still slow yes. This rarely matters for a web/application server. When it comes to running, it is plenty enough.
It isn't open source:
So what. It's close enough.
Ok, that over with, was this darn topic necessary? I like both LAMP and Java. They have their uses, why did the poster and the article have to turn this into a confrontation?
Re:Where to go ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Allright then...
and there are no free (as in beer) quality servers
Apache Tomcat.
(..and kinky, every one and their mom developed a framework)
Doesn't mean you have to use them all.
I want a decent middle ware, that is cross platform, fast, and well documented, free as in beer (and preferably as in speech also).
That's Java.
Re:What the? (Score:5, Insightful)
LAMP is great for what it does, but MySQL has no place in the enterprise. There's way too much important stuff that it lacks. I'm sure the nice folks who run /. can tell you of their many misadventures with MySQL, if they chose to...
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go find my asbestos suit.
LAMP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Use Lisp (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I think those were all pretty valid reasons.
Re:I just got myself some new asbestos underwear (Score:5, Insightful)
Why "of course"?
Am I alone in wondering exactly what a "next-generation application" is anyway?
What qualities or requirements define a "next-generation application", other than it not having been developed yet?
Anyhow, it was my take on the article that the use of 'P' languages was incidental, it was the grid concept and the horizontal scaling. The 'P' languages just happen to be part of a readily available set of tools for implementing this idea.
Forced into and OO "paradigm"? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason for using an OO language is to get you to work with objects and encapsulation. There's a really good reason to do any large enterprise level application using objects. That is that the app is being designed to last longer than one year. That means that during it's life back-end systems are going to change, customer requirements are going to change, and new requirements are going to be introduced.
If you haven't properly separated out all of the portions of your code then when they come back and say "can you give us these two functions running on PDA's?" you're gonna be SOL.
(I spent a year building a system and they promised to transition one of the back-end systems to a whole new platform by the end of the job. They never succeeded but we developed against the old system and the new so it didn't slow us down one bit. THAT'S why you take the time to do OO work.)
Laughing all the way! (Score:5, Insightful)
No seriously, it is like comparing apples and oranges. PHP and the wonderous LAMP stack (I have just heard about it, so that is the first stumbling block for its adoption! many companies like to be fast followers) might be able to do what Java does if you look at output, it might even be quick, but that has nothing to do with the costs and development and staffing that real people with real money care about.
Java has a huge demand in industry that is being met with huge interest in terms of capable candidates which is proven by the number of successful and *bearing in mind this isn't a flamewar!* well written open source project out there.
The level of Java competency in the industry is growing enormously as a result, which is a good thing. PHP is also good, and I like PHP, lets not get things mixed up here.
[snip = list of reasons why people choose java, which was boring even me]
Also J2EE is *the* platform for applications running for thousands of users, on machines with 90+ GB of ram, and 24 processors just to handle the data requirements.
Oracle love J2EE. Oracle is a fairly decent enterprise (not just performance, but support and board level confidence) db to say the least.
Now, LAMP might be lovely, but why even pitch it against anything, dear LAMP community, just be, don't try and compare it against anything.
FUD et al.
PS: erm, nerr nerr? u sux0r? pwned? I am loosing my touch at this internet name calling gaff, time to retire.
Re:Where to go ? (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience, as a developer and as a web user, a simple non-EJB java webapp running a relatively mature framework (or not), on something like Resin is capable of tremendous performance, but I'll state that as opinion to try and avoid baiting some PHP flametard into posting how many views his anime forum can handle.
If you are developing for something that isn't going on a server you run, with a nice simple Java webapp all of a sudden you (or more often someone else) can choose your OS (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc), your DB server (MySQL, PostreSQL, Oracle, etc), AND your web server (Apache, IIS, none, etc). Thats something that MSFT and LAMP-heads don't offer (without compromising their acronym) and something that client IT departments will very much appreciate. A "pure" admin (i.e. one who doesn't consider him/herself a developer), HATES being told by some outside developer to patch their systems, or run something they don't know or don't like.
Rapid prototyping overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, rapid prototyping is overrated for all but impressing your manager or client. If you need to protoype you clearly do not understand the problem at hand and if you do prototype for the above given reason, you manager will make you use the prototype as base for production development. This means you spend the same amount of time as if you'd started properly straight away (and told him/her and their required demos to get lost for a few weeks) but end up with an inferior product because you are contantly hacking around the shortcuts you took to make that rapid prototype.
The two are just very different beasts and there is a clear case when a proper OO language with clear contracts and inheritence is the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, web apps aren't the best example of such a case and that makes this comparison flawed, not the language in question itself!
Whoa there cowboy.. you don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
J2EE is not about the OS, server or database. It's a specification. JBoss (JBass.. heh), Geronimo, Welogic and many others are implementations of it. Some are certified, some are not, like Resin.
You can run it on many os's, including linux. Apache is making one of the J2EE servers. I'm not sure where databases came into all of this, since it's fairly independent. I.e. w/ jboss, there are data mappings for all of these servers, if you decide to use EJB, which is part of the spec, but not a requirement to use. The last thing is the big ol' P.
J2EE is a set of technology specs. Things like XML manipulations (JAXB, JAXM), communication "stuff", like SOAP, JMS and JMX, database abstractions, like EJB using JDO, CMP, BMP.. "web stuff", though you can do your own protocols, with the servlet spec. Last I checked, the closes to a spec I've seen is p5ee, which had an interesting run. You had options of what to use, maybe too many, in p5ee, but that was about it. It would have been nice to see a tight binding between everything.
Anyway.. the LAM in LAMP is irrelivant in this article. I can use Linux, Apache and MySQL with J2EE if I so desired.
Re:Do not equate JAva to J2EE (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I think you're wrong. J2EE is great if you need the features it supports: JMS, distributed transactions, database connection pooling, jsp/servlets etc etc.
Now if you'd said "EJB", which is only a part of J2EE: and by far its worst part, then I'd have agreed with you. EJB is the epitome of what happens when something is designed by committee.
Re:Where to go ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Erm, back to basics folks... EE and strings? (Score:5, Insightful)
So we came from string programming roots, we developed OOP and AOP, and now... now we go back to string programming because of xml parsing?
I find this a worrying trend, you have to understand, an application is state, and behaviour.
This is trying to tie an application into a 'thin veneer' over an operating system, which seems a bit worrying for an app that will cost a few million to develop in the right circles.
Be reducing all the benefits of OOP (huge and varied, numerous and wonderful) we seek to define our crowining enterprise applications with an approach from the 70's that would pioneer the use of string processing programming constructs over highly developed and structured powerful programming tools.
The program isn't the code, it isn't the data, it is the design, the behaviour, the organisation, the people understanding it. All of this becomes very alien to us when we go this route.
Humanising code is key to developing the kind of applications this company has now touted.
What is looselycoupled? Anyone read it regularly? is it a valid news source? Is this some free advertising for a fad?
I am almost tempted to read more about the LAMP, but I just have a knowing feeling it will be another 'cure all' product.
Yep, tick tick, oops, missed one, back to step 1.
Re:Where to go ? (Score:3, Insightful)
EJBs do have their place. They are good for distibuting your objects across servers when the data processing is so costly that it outweighs the cost of remote invocation.
The problem with EJBs is that everyone tried to use them for everything, and later realised that they were using an expensive (processing wise) hammer to crack a nut.
JMS and MDBs also shouldn't be ignored...they too have their place.
To claim that EJBs are a p-o-s is to ignore the applications where they do work...
Re:In which world? (Score:5, Insightful)
People often equate J2EE with web applications and so do the J2EE-vs-LAMP comparison without the right information. J2EE is more than just web applications. You can build non-web clients that use the J2EE component model (they can even be built in other languages and use CORBA mappings). J2EE provides connections to legacy systems. J2EE supports asynchronous messaging. You can do pretty much everything transactionally with J2EE as well, so that if something fails along the way you can rollback your changes.
Actually, comparing J2EE to LAMP is wrong in another way. A J2EE server can run on Linux. An Apache web server is often used as a front end to a J2EE server (especially when you integrate the app server within an already-existing web server infrastructure). You could use MySQL (though I think you'd better off using ASA [ianywhere.com], but I'm biased) as long as you make sure to use transactional tables. There goes the "LAM" part of "LAMP".
So really, you're comparing the Java-based J2EE framework against similar Perl/PHP/Python frameworks. At least, that's what you should be comparing. Maybe for pure web apps the latter are better. I don't know, but you have to compare oranges to oranges.
EricJavaScript is not Java [ericgiguere.com]
LAMP reduex (Score:2, Insightful)
Apache
Mason:HTML
Postgresql
That's how I like my fire. Much more capable than MySQL or PHP.
So who do people compare LAMP to J2EE? Because they are both application development approaches that are crawling with cheap plentiful labor. Any dweeb can set up LAMP with a minimal understanding of reliability, security, or fundamental concepts. Please do not construe this as a statement that all LAMP developers are dweebs. But the entry barrier is low.
Similarly the entry barrier to J2EE can be artificially low because all you need is a certificate to wave around and some PHB will hire you. My work has hired a series of J2EE developer contract houses and they are without question the dumbest bunch of assholes I've ever worked with in my life. They are fundamentally clueless on how to write good code, but they are just so cheap!
The entry barrier to Mason and Postgresql are much higher. Not because they suck, but because of what they can do and what they can't do. Once you get started it's pretty amazing what you can do.
It's the higher entry barrier that helps insure that the developers you do get are better qualified in terms of fundamentals, security, and reliability.
Oh yeah, PHP and J2EE are different beasts. You would be better off comparing J2EE and mod_perl variants for a more similar architecture.
You're missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
The "heavy" part of the application is what does all of the back-end work. Database manipulation, messaging, legacy-system communication and integration, calculations, life cycle management, etc.
The fact is that customers hardly ever know what they want when you start developing. Development is a continuous feedback cycle where you show some, get new requirements, and show some more.
So, maybe you save a week or two of development time using one of the P's instead of good OO design and Java. What happens when they come back a month later and say can you hook in system X to this? What happens when the small system unexpectedly takes off and they need to add in 150+ more concurrent users?
Strong design should not be looked at as an extra expense. Strong design should be looked at as future proofing.
Lisp vs. C (Score:4, Insightful)
ah, the eternal dynamic/productive/high-level/slow vs static/unproductive/low-level/fast debacle.
Nice to see the Lisp vs C flame still going strong these days... :)
Nice to see too both have many intelectual descendents which are very good on their own.
And finally, nice to see that both sides of the same coin have seen such widespread adoption to this day, proof that more than one way of thinking is a good thing.
Re:Parent rewritten with some HTML code (Score:5, Insightful)
It took me one week as part of a work placement in a summer holiday to learn all about EJBs. Either it can't be that hard, or I'm a genius.
Oh, and I think it's a little contradictory to argue this line, then argue along the lines of just doing some no-brainer form-filling with the application server.
J2EE is about more than just shopping carts, and thus it WILL take longer to learn than a system that's suited to running an online shopping cart.
Java AS suck RAM big time (and CPU too). BEA advises customers to use open-source technology (Apache) to server static content, cuz' it would kill the server.
That's because application servers are not web servers. Sledgehammer and nut spring to mind.
PHP actually is running the internet far more than java has ever been
See above. Java is about running applications that just so happen to have a web front-end. PHP is about hosting websites that just so happen to have some application logic behind them.
J2EE only has it place in big enterprises that are willing to get it becuase the big bucks it costs come with some big name company that offers support.
"the big bucks it costs" - *COUGH* [jboss.org]
even in enterprise contexts, the largest part of the majority of apps is pretty stupid form entry and validation
If that's the case, you don't need a big server cluster to manage it...
Just say no to "LAMP" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Use Lisp (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In which world? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, Perl and PHP have their uses, but running large commercial websites is not their strong suite, at least not with the additional maintenance requirements on ours.
Re:mirrordot not quick enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously - <WBR> tags either don't render at all, or render as "\n" (if a long string needs to be broken at that point). I've never understood why slashdot uses spaces (which muck up URLs), instead of <WBR>s (which generally don't).
Anyone?
Re:J2EE != EJB (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and when your security needs are more complex than the simplistic EJB model, you have to either use no declarative security (and write your own) or to apply ugly hacks around the deficiencies...
Re:In which world? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh yes it does, for a very basic reason.
Java is already compiled, it just needs to be linked.
PHP/Perl has to be compiled (interpreted), then linked. For each page hit.
For trivial pages, this is not such a big difference, but add in I18N support, inter-page communication support, session support, etc, and the time it takes to load up the "environment" in PHP/Perl completely swamps the time it takes to render a page.
I code in both (and some ASP). For a q&d web site, PHP every time. For an enterprise level app with hundreds of pages, thousands of classes, J2EE is THE choice.
Also, J2EE gives you a running application, whereas PHP is started for each page hit. With a running app, you can keep all sorts of information in memory, you can trigger events based on time, you can spawn threads, etc. You can set up database connection pooling, which means that there are constant active connections to the database, which REALLY speeds up back end access.
Each has its own place. I use both.
We can also go into the fact that Java is not free, but I'll leave you to analyze that on your own.
d/l J2EE JDK (free)
d/l Apache/Tomcat (free)
d/l Eclipse IDE (free)
d/l MySQL (free)
Ok, I did my analysis, and my conclusion is that is it free.
Re:And you should talk about being sound engineer. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lisp vs. C (Score:3, Insightful)
Help me understand where the functional paradigm of Lisp enters either side...
MySQL no place? It has many places... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In which world? (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me your PHP/MySQL solution and I bet I can bring it to its knees with a few properly placed bad queries and/or data structures.
To make any conclusions about technologies based on your one example would be a crime (...though, this is /. after all...)
Re:I just got myself some new asbestos underwear (Score:2, Insightful)
And these are bad things?
I do agree with you, however, that PERL (the only P language I have experience with) is great for quick applications. But there is no way on G-d's Earth I would use it for enterprise (50 000+ LoC) worthy applications. I'll stick with Java.
But that's just my opinion...
Re:In which world? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) PHP
For web scripting.
Do something small and fast.
Will run fast.
Won't scale for the strictest rules of scaling.
2) J2EE
For everything big, not just web sites.
Do something large and right, which takes more front time, but much less time to keep up. A good way to program yourself out of a job, easily. (Can be done with PHP, but not really stressed so much.)
Will run fast, but can consume a lot of resources in the process. If it's running slow, just give it more memory, and learn -Xmx settings.
Will scale in all senses of the word.
Now... a little on the scalability...
1) Load balancers are only 1 section of a huge problem, and you can load balance anything, including LAMP.
2) Transaction support is new to the M in lamp, and no one uses them in the P part. J2EE has a transaction system (JTA) that will combine all your data access into one big happy transaction, on all your resources that support JTA (includes JDBC).
3) Session state replication is completely absent from LAMP. A server could catch fire in a good J2EE configuration, and when the user clicks submit, they wouldn't even know, because at least two servers will have the users session id.
Ok... now about why it takes less upkeep in J2EE land...
1) Specs require backwards compatibility in all new versions. I've had problems with every section of LAMP on this issue, but never on J2EE.
2) A JSP page is only supposed to display information and forms. There is no logic in it. If you have problems with this, I recommend STRUTS. Some people recommend WebWork or Spring. It's a matter of taste, but STRUTS is still the top dog. In PHP, you have to work hard to not mix the two. I used to do action= in the get to simulate this behavior, but it's still not as good, just workable.
3) If you want a rich application accessing your data, you can do it through the same CORBA, SOAP, or XMLRPC calls. The newest spec from J2EE allows you to turn a normal function on a Session Bean (EJB) into a web service that can be called from anything, including JavaScript on Mozilla or a Flash animation (I have done this). Since it's calling the exact same method, if the database changes, you only have to update the code in the least number of places possible.
Features completely abscent from LAMP:
Good web-service support (you can fake it, but Zope actually does XML RPC for you)
JTA (Transaction system)
JMS (Messaging System for asynchronous processing)
Things commonly thought to be missing from Java, but aren't:
Easy scripting of SQL (The Java Standard Taglib is far easier to use than anything I used in PHP or Perl, but Zope probably has everyone beat there)
Speed (the bottleneck in 99% of all software is disk related... If you know how to make a database properly, it will be fast.)
Genuine concerns with Java:
Memory consumption.
Threading on your particular platform.
Lagged support for the newest features on all platforms.
Doesn't automatically pool database connections.
Can be hard to configure properly.
Requires more knowledge than it lets on.
Re:What the? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In which world? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come on! Some of the most heavily trafficed sites in the world - commerical and otherwise - are built on perl/php and seem to do just fine. Why do these discussions ALWAYS degenerate into "technology Y is better than technology X"? The fact of the matter is that, within a pretty broad spectrum of reason, what technology you use is not the deciding factor of how successful and maintainable your app is going to be. The day someone does come out with a miracle technology that REALLY improves a project's chances of success, we'll all know about it pretty darn quick because everybody will flock to it overnight - and i mean actual people, not magazine articles or Oreilly books. Given that we're all still having "my language can beat up your language" discussions on Slashdot, it's pretty safe to say that we're not at that point yet.
If you had a bad experience with a Perl/PHP based site before, the chances are pretty high that the fault is more with the designers (or lack of) and builders than the languages used. No sweat, this job is a learning experience and the first couple of apps will always be dogfood. A very good book once described mastery (in the development business) as the stage where you don't want to rip up all the code you've done in the last six months and start over.
Re:Scripting languages suck (Score:1, Insightful)
Can any fan of the Perl, PHP, or Python explain why they are better than java or C# for LARGE applications?
Sure, these dynamic programming languages don't get in the way of programmers who know what they are doing and practice test-driven development.
That's the point you're missing.. unit tests. While you're trying to get your app to compile and using casts to get objects out of your iterators, I'm writing the test, writing the code, and I get more done in less time. And yes, I *do* run the application to find bugs. Via running the unit tests and other tests (integration tests). Don't pretend like *you* don't have to do that too.
It's pretty easy: if you practice TDD with 100% test coverage, and your team is small, stable and smart, you can do better with dynamic languages like Ruby (the others are okay too).
Otherwise stick to the Java and the C#. But don't be surprised if you have a competitor doing it the other way who beats you to market with a better product.
Re:What the? (Score:3, Insightful)