Message-Id: <l03010600aebb7ae5b879@[206.86.254.216]>
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Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 07:45:04 -0800
To: new-httpd@hyperreal.com
From: Lucid <root@secret.org>
Subject: Re: Apache vs. MSIIS
Sender: new-httpd-owner@apache.org
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Reply-To: new-httpd@hyperreal.com

>> IIS 1.0 was not great, IIS 2.0 did even deserve the version number, but
>> watch out on IIS 3.0.  The advantage of IIS 3.0 is not the web server, but
>> the components that go with it.  If you use Front Page 97 with IIS 3.0 you
>> can build some incredible pages.  These pages take advantage of the new
>> Active Server framework.
>
>This is what a local consulting firm believed as well.  They built a web
>site on one of their own systems using NT, IIS and FrontPage.  Then they
>phoned 35 different ISP's in the Toronto area trying to find one that
>would host their site and support the FrontPage extensions.  They were
>unable to find a single ISP that would do that.
>
>For Intranet enterprise solutions, FrontPage and IIS may be great, but
>it is certainly nowhere to be found in the Internet ISP arena at this point.
>
>-Rasmus


I am currently working with NT and am in Hell (tm Microsoft)...
The best way to judge web servers is how well they support
rapid development tools that work. If you check out the NT perl
mailing list you will find that perl under NT is barely functional.
I could only get sockets to work if I connected to the same machine
the server was running on... I dont know what that is good for.
It seems to me that the only way to use scripts is to put them in /cgi-bin
and the IDC development tools from microsoft for nt 3.5.1 only allow
for one SQL query per transaction. I cant generate anything
dynamicaly under NT, not even simple HTML pages that have headlines
displayed in a random order. In my possibly limited experience
I have noticed that NT is drastically less stable then unix even
NetBSD a free unix. I have seen this NT server crash at least once a week,
while my unix server will run for months without being rebooted.

If all you want to do is put HTML up on the net or interface your
"legacy" Microsoft SQL server to the web, then NT might be the way
to go. But it has been my experience that microsoft (and netscape)
server are products interested in pushing their standards. Apache
allows me to dynamic language/data negotation, I can build code
in perl for CGI or FastCGI, I can write it in C or C++ if it needs
to be a touch faster, or if (as some of our future work will use)
I want I can build a module to interface via Location directly into
a database generated html so everything in /data is mapped directly
to a C module with uses SQL templates to generate the entire site.


The only thing IIS has on apache is a graphical configuration
manager... I am activly working to resolve this problem.
As soon as I can get some time to clean up the code I will
have a beta of a java based config manager for apache.
(yes, source code... and apache style licensing agreement)


So basically, from now on I am refusing to take on clients that
want their sites developed under NT.
(unless they pay 3x the normal rate ;-)


-bill
bmorris@memetic.com