Fast CGI Vs Java Application Servers

[Paul Boddie]

ctcgag at hotmail.com wrote in message news:<20030630120924.209$qh at newsreader.com>...
> Charles Handy <chppxf1 at NOSPAM_yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> > How does FastCGI compare against java Apps running in java app servers
> > like TomCat, Sun One, WebLogic and WebSphere?  Is there a business case
> > for switching from CGI to Java?
> 
> Do you want there to be one?

I think that other contributors to this thread have given interesting
"recruitment cases" for introducing Java (the usual stuff about Java
being a standard and there being lots of "Java people" in the job
market), but then FastCGI/CGI is a very vague term. Is the application
in question written in C or C++ (insane as that may seem to developers
using more modern languages)? Is the person who posted the question
still reading this thread? ;-)

One might well argue that a switch from C/C++ to Java might be a
worthwhile investment, given the benefits of Java over those
languages, but a switch from Tcl, Perl or Python to Java needs to be
more rigourously justified in my opinion.

> > Performance?
> 
> I've seen dozens of features that were implemented in CGI (not mod_perl
> or FastCGI) rewritten to run on a java app server on a beefier machine.
> None of them were noticably faster, and many were slower.

In various respects, I also believe this to be true. However, there
was an interesting case a few months ago where the scalability of Zope
was compared with WebSphere on some serious hardware. The outcome
(which highlighted certain issues with Zope's threaded execution
model, at least in the way it was employed in that particular case)
doesn't reduce the relevance of other solutions available for Tcl,
Perl and Python. Indeed, in Python solutions there are various
different execution models on offer:

  http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/WebProgramming

Contrast Twisted, mod_python, Webware and SkunkWeb.

> > Productivity?
> 
> I'm about 5x less productive in Java.

Indeed. But in the development of a Web application, one also has to
consider how productive different members of the extended team are,
too. That can have a lot more to do with the chosen technologies
deployed on top of the programming language and application server in
question.

[...]

> > Code Reuse?
> 
> Switching a working application to a new language is about the
> greatest possible crime there is against code reuse.

"We believe in code reuse. Apart from the system we just threw away,
of course."

Paul