Because eventually if the commerical plan is properly executed a small website becomes a large website spanning many countries. The last thing you want in this situation is non-standardization caused by “free-stuff” because is open source, and people with the ability tweaked it because well it was open source and they can.
If it is a commercial application of course it is the guys in suits driving the show. The last thing the guy in suits want to hear about is a loose canon developer trying to leverage their “unique” situation of some non-standardized software. Guys in suits would rather be in the situation where loose canon developers can be hot-swapped like a USB device.
No one is doubting Apache and its role in expanding www. But once again I’m talking about the situation from a commercial perspective. So yes you want the confidence of the guy in expensive suit.
Sure the code maybe based on some nonsense, like the developers were paid based on how many lines of code they wrote ( :help: ). But at least the bumble-fck in India and the bumble-fck in China and the bumble-fck in the North America can be on the same page relatively quickly, since they were all certified by the same MS bumble-fck.
Commerical operations are driven by standardization which allows for support and scalability across platforms, countries, and languages.
I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for “land of the free stuff” to exist on the web. The whole culture of the web is based on the “free stuff” or “next to free stuff.” But there is a reason why even projects that were driven by the tech savy guy using “free stuff” eventually migrates off that stuff.
I mean after they pull the wool over the VC’s eyes do you think they want to be stuck supporting their own stuff…
That is very rarely how open source works in practice. You don’t monkey-patch your own copy so that it’s different to others, except in desperate circumstances. You might (rarely) choose to base a new project on something that already exists – but that’s no different (and is done in the same cases) as having a completely new piece of custom software written. Except that there’s less code to write.
Anyway, I’m not a particular proponent of open source, though many of the things I use happen to have such licenses. Let’s not turn this into a philosophical debate
Right - if you hire loose canon developers. A different, easier approach is to hire reliable professionals, like you would for anything else.
Meanwhile, I’m confused by your conflagration of “standardized” with “sold by Microsoft”. Are you suggesting that their software changes more slowly than other software, and so has better compatibility across versions? This doesn’t really seem to be the case, given their continual release of new revolutionary platforms that they tell everyone they have to buy, and then spend millions updating their code for What exactly do you mean when you say “standard”?
This thread really degenerated into the off-topic realm. In any event, as you know by now, the answer is yes. And the yes answer has many flavors to it.
Suggest you approach it from your business-person sense and decide for yourself what is needed for your business. Google “website questionnaire” and you’ll find good starting examples for inquiry. Since you mentioned templates, seems that you won’t need super fancy stuff and customized stuff.
Finally, know your budget. Then check if the hosters have your solution. If not, then can always to sites like elance.com and find your own developer/programmer.
Good luck!
ps-
I wonder if the entrepreneur club has a topic on this… local firm who’s been featured in Taiwan/Taipei is AskMorris Inc.
I’m alluding more to the standardization of the product and the corporate support they offer their products. Take for the O/S of the server. If one goes with Linux, one might be stuck to one particular ISP because the application was developed for their “special” version of Linux on their servers. So when one tries to move to or expand into another Linux server farm there might be compatibility issues.
The same can be said of DB. Commercial application will be partial to Computer Associate or Oracle or MS because you know they can support your application. Not to mention an army of trained technicians that can employeed to maintain the environment.
Of course there is cost an associated with this standardization and support.
I have no idea what whitetiger is planning to do, so I have no idea if my input is even helpful.
For all I know he wanted a simple HTML website with an animated gif…and maybe some Flash to be really fancy…
Dude, you don’t need a programmer with ten years of experience to build a website. Jeesh.
A good designer, sure. A programmer, not necessarily.
I use ExpressionEngine for the work I do. It is a proprietary PHP/MySQL driven publishing system. Brendon will only be able to find one very minor security flaw (which was immediately patched) that has ever been found for the system. This again goes to show that good developers can write secure code in PHP.
Brendon, I apologize for bagging on you earlier but you have to know by now that if you rant on a subject then there will be someone who will turn that rant right back at you by taking the other side.
Sure. But lots of people have websites which break down all the time. If your website is important to your business, it’s good to have a website that doesn’t do that. Which means getting it done properly.
Can you show me an example of an ISP that runs a “special” Linux? I’ve never encountered it.
[quote=“manofsteel”]Dude, you don’t need a programmer with ten years of experience to build a website. Jeesh.
A good designer, sure. A programmer, not necessarily.[/quote]
Indeed. But if your website includes custom-written code, then good code is better than bad code. And learning to write good code (in any language) takes a long, long time.
Yes they can, and I have not disputed that anywhere in this thread. In fact I’ve said the same thing in a couple of places. And there are some good reasons why a competent programmer would choose PHP. Perhaps their client or employer is forcing it upon them, due to a legacy codebase or sheer ignorance.
Or perhaps they want to make money by selling their code to developers (please note that this is very different to selling a business service implemented with code, which is what a contract programmer does). This is easy in PHP land (where most people can’t write such code themselves, and where there aren’t a huge number of excellent free (and Free) solutions). It’s not so easy in real software land.
You don’t need to apologise. But taking the other side does not mean you are throwing my rant back at me. In fact so far you haven’t disputed a single specific thing I’ve said, in any coherent way
[quote]Yes they can, and I have not disputed that anywhere in this thread. In fact I’ve said the same thing in a couple of places. And there are some good reasons why a competent programmer would choose PHP. Perhaps their client or employer is forcing it upon them, due to a legacy codebase or sheer ignorance.
Or perhaps they want to make money by selling their code to developers (please note that this is very different to selling a business service implemented with code, which is what a contract programmer does). This is easy in PHP land (where most people can’t write such code themselves, and where there aren’t a huge number of excellent free (and Free) solutions). It’s not so easy in real software land. [/quote]
They sell this PHP solution to both designers and developers. The system is good enough to work for the majority of people in that community. When it falls short, it can easily be extended. The system is built in PHP because at this time that is where the largest market lies. PHP is a standard offering for pretty much any hosting provider. There are some that specialize in .NET and Rails now but the vast majority off PHP.
There is no coherent argument in a rant nor is there a coherent response.
The Linux is open source, anyone can modify it to whatever need they want. There is no guarantee the ISP A is going to give you the same Linux box as ISP B. Unless you’re carrying around your own kernel.
Sure if you’re on a shared server or if you don’t plan on changing boxed often, this is an acceptable option.
From a commercial standpoint IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Novell, and Red Hat supported verison of the O/S which diverge. Now as a consumer does one really want to deal with minute issues of the O/S as they are changing their servers.
Unless one wants to put compete faith in the community to look out for your commercial interest…
We obviously share different philosophies about this stuff. And I don’t think it is helping the original poster in the least at this point.
I think it’s obvious by now that no-one involved in this debate is going to budge an inch, least of all me So now that we’ve all made our positions clear, I don’t really have anything more to say.
I’ll leave you with one more link – an article by Paul Graham about languages. Now I’m not really a fan of PG. He’s an egotist and he’s wrong about a lot of things - hackers are not like painters, no matter how much he wants to be an artiste. Still, he’s right about this one, and expresses his reasoning with clarity:
IMHO this is a simplistic viewpoint pulled directly from the opinions of non-PHP web developers who feel usurped by the rise of PHP. PHP is absolutely great for some stuff and crap for other stuff. Your average basic business site with a bit of dynamic processing for templates, languages etc. and perhaps a few basic ordering or ticket systems does not need a custom-built super-secure backend that takes three years to write and in the end breaks anyway.
What a load of rubbish. It’s ridiculously easy to write dangerously broken code in C/C++ et al. When you say ‘we’ and ‘cannot happen’, perhaps you could expand on this perfect infallible language. You’re not a Python user by any chance, are you? :s
That argument has come up a few times, but I can’t figure out where I implied that I think websites should be complicated or expensive. Personally I am usually a hell of a lot cheaper than even the local PHP shops
What a load of rubbish. It’s ridiculously easy to write dangerously broken code in C/C++ et al. When you say ‘we’ and ‘cannot happen’, perhaps you could expand on this perfect infallible language. You’re not a Python user by any chance, are you? :s[/quote]
When I said “other languages” I didn’t mean all other languages Nor have I said that my language is perfect and infallible, merely that it there is basically no code written in it which is vulnerable to SQL injection. Why are you putting words in my mouth?
And yeah, if it wasn’t obvious from my recommendations post (and LinkedIn profile in my sig), I’m currently a Python guy. But there are plenty of other languages I have time for too, as I said in that post.
Sure. But lots of people have websites which break down all the time. If your website is important to your business, it’s good to have a website that doesn’t do that. Which means getting it done properly.[/quote]
Of course all those breakdowns are caused by bad programming without any being attributable to hardware, loss of line etc etc.
[quote=“Brendon”][quote=“manofsteel”]Dude, you don’t need a programmer with ten years of experience to build a website. Jeesh.
A good designer, sure. A programmer, not necessarily.[/quote]
Indeed. But if your website includes custom-written code, then good code is better than bad code. And learning to write good code (in any language) takes a long, long time.[/quote]
Then i suggest you define a long, long time bearing in mind your lack of practical working experience since you left Uni in 2003.
[quote=“Brendon”]
When I said “other languages” I didn’t mean all other languages Nor have I said that my language is perfect and infallible, merely that it there is basically no code written in it which is vulnerable to SQL injection. Why are you putting words in my mouth?[/quote]
Cutting through all the off-topic shenanigans, my essential beef is that someone has asked for a simple web design outfit, someone else offered a suggestion and nothing else very helpful was put forward except ‘dude, PHP sucks balls’. I don’t think it’s fair or useful to discount that particular company because they use an industry standard for web-based development. Especially when you don’t offer up any of your own designs that are better than the aforementioned design outfit’s
We used to have a host running Slackware Linux. They eventually closed down so I had to move everything to a host running some flavour of Debian which meant a lot of stuff didn’t work any more because things are set up differently in Debian. Then we stopped arsing around with the semi-hobbiest guys who try to use obscure packages for the hell of it and moved to a large professional outfit with Cobalt Raqs + Redhat. You’d be amazed at how much a pain in the arse it is to shift large projects just from one Linux-based host to another slightly different Linux-based host - one of the reasons why I stopped using C/compiled CGI apps and moved gradually to PHP for all web-based stuff. Yeh, not very fashionable in the world of underground coders but no downtime in many years and stuff that just works is fine and dandy by me. So :raspberry:
So now that we’ve all made our positions clear, I don’t really have anything more to say.
