Since I've known about Node.js, I've always been a fan of it. But today I found about SignalR, which provides an alternative asynchronous - scalable - realtime model for ASP.NET.
As far as I know, the main advantage of Node.js over SignalR is sharing code between client-server (another advantage should be that it is cross-platform), and the main advantage of SignalR is a much more mature framework and far better tool (IDE) support. So I wonder: if SignalR is here, do we need Node.js on Windows anymore? Are there any advantages of Node.js I don't know?
SignalR is a viable alternative to Socket.IO and Node.js. There are other reasons to use javascript on the server however.
It flattens the stack. Almost any website these days has to have javascript on the browser, and if you use it on the server as well, you can cut one language out of the batch that you'll have to be proficient in.
Message passing is very natural. JSON Everywhere! Especially combined with a document database which uses JSON, all message passing just becomes JSON objects. This makes reduces the amount of message brokering that has to happen throughout the system.
It's not Microsoft. I personally love what Microsoft has done for the development community. They make fantastic tools and one of the best frameworks and languages around. That being said, some people just love to hate Microsoft.
Cost. There are many good ways to get Microsoft tools for free or very cheap (Express editions and Biz Spark). There is still a higher cost associated with working with Microsoft tools. I believe this cost is worth the productivity gains in most instances, but not everyone agrees.
In addition to the above, there is still the story going around that you can't scale long polling requests on IIS due to the threading model. This has some truth to it, but with good code design, and some server tweaks, you can mostly get around these problems.
Related
So I'm new to node.js, javascript frameworks, and meteor.com. I'm trying to learn how to build social networks, and I'm naive/struggling to understand why Meteor.js (meteor.com) wouldn't be able to do all the great things you see now that twitter, facebook, instagram are doing?
There's the comet technology between client/server, authentication configs, asynchronous coding for scaling and performance, and built on top of node.js.
I'm trying to learn more about long polling, comet, gridFS or how files are stored, and in general things like replication sets, and sharding to help with performance (esp since Redhat has this openshift platform that we can build our own private clouds with).
I have some computer science background, but it seems like magic, so what am I missing? If you all could think of a few buzz words that make a social network tick that Meteor.js doesn't support, what would it be?
I hear things about parallel and concurrency (webworkers fixes that in part, no?), websockets, that high level languages like python or java are better off supporting. There's only one to learn my answers, and thats by doing, but thought someone could sway me one way or the other via this thread. Thanks!
This question encompasses a really broad idea and just focusing on using meteor alone would solve this issue. Here are a few points to consider:
I don't think this framework would be a good starting point to learn long-polling, gridFS, etc etc. Meteor aims to be a framework that tends to be more of an ecosystem of packages e.g. you can certainly roll your own aformentioned strategies -- however for dynamic updates, Meteor uses its own Data Delivery Protocol (DDP) supported/implemented by (surprise) a good bunch of core packages such as Spark.
Parallel processing and concurrency can be better off done using other languages, but why not with? Since Meteor is largely based on node.js, and node.js is really good with the aforementioned stuff plus it can play very well with other languages so you could integrate smoothly. Meteor doesn't really require you purely rely on it, as other languages would say the same thing. It's all in the general engineering / planning for your project. There are already lots of really good stuff out there that rely on Meteor, join in! don't be afraid. It all boils down to planning (and the courage/perseverance to pull it off, of course).
Right now, we cannot tell if Meteor would be incapable of the usual great stuff by gigantic websites. Sure, we can do live updates, (its own kind of) publish/subscribe patterns, and powerful stuff to boost development (look at the seven core concepts of meteor to best understand this). It is not impossible to replicate what is already out there, really. We can only say it with uncertainty at the moment mainly because.. (see next point)
The framework is so young! it's still at 0.6.x at the time of writing. Please take time to look at the Meteor Roadmap to see how things are going in terms of broader support for persistence/databases, performance considerations, and the official DDP specification.
I hope I have answered your enquiry (and more, I hope). I'm really excited for meteor myself as it could easily be the next big thing. We have a couple of (for-)production projects using Meteor as well, so you're getting direct insight from a person who has done quite a bit of hacking (and tons of research and first-hand experience) in Meteor. Not that i'm saying i'm an expert or so, it's just so much fun to work with Meteor and i'm totally not kidding you.
Hope this helps!
P.S.: Fair warning though, resources and documentation is really sparse at this point. I try to contribute to the community as much as I can about it (one of my starting points is here, on SO).
I whould like to know some opinions about OpenEJB: we are considering to use it on a new project, but really didn't found many opinions about it.
So, here is my question: how about it? Does it perform well? Is it stable enough for a production environment?
We switched to OpenEJB (deployed embedded in our app on Tomcat). Performance tests showed better or not worse results processing our transactions compared to JBoss (transactions include data access, JMS, and servlets). We use ActiveMQ within OpenEJB for JMS. There are no stability problems as of yet - we are still in staging (pre-production) environment though. The documentation is definitely lacking, but not as poor as other embedded choices. Overall, we consider this as a good choice if you run on Tomcat. Deploying it on other application servers turned out to be much more difficult (JBoss, Weblogic, Websphere) but there are not many reasons for this usually (we had few but dropped this after several attempts basically failed).
And as in all open source products: expect lack of support (documentation, troubleshooting, bugs, etc.) to be compensated by free access to sources.
We've had experience with Oracle OAS and JBOSS before. We decided to give OpenEJB a try. We've found out that it is not only very fast but it also much easier to setup and configure, and it has much better defaults.
Currently we implement our own failure measures in the client, so we don't know how they compare for clustering, or other advanced features that we don't use.
We we have to go back and deal with JBOSS in the developer side, we see a drop on productivity, because it takes too long to bootstrap.
Until recently I'd considered myself to be a pretty good web programmer (coming up for 10yrs commercial experience on a variety of e-commerce, static and enterprise applications). I'm self taught and have always used the Microsoft product stack (ASP, ASP.NET)...
My applications are always functional, relatively bug free, but have never been lightening quick. As a frequent web user I always found this to be the norm... how fast are the websites from the big tech players (eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Telerik etc etc) - in truth none are particularly fast. I always attributed this to "the way things are with web apps"...
...then I cam across a product called Jira from atlasian and this has stopped me in my tracks...
This application is fast, and I mean blindingly fast.. too fast to time the switches between pages, fully live content, lots of images and data and cross references etc etc...
I run this on an intranet, with a large application DB, and this is running on a very normal server (single processor, SATA HDD, 8GB RAM).
Am I missing something?? Are my programming techniques that bad?? I am wondering if this speed gain is down to it being written in Java and running on Tomcat.
Does anyone have any benchmarks to compare JSP / ASP or Tomcat / IIS???
Thanks,
Mark
NOTE: this isn't a blatant plug for Jira. I don't work for them or have any affiliation to them... but I would like to be able to write applications like them :)
YMMV. But one of the longest-lived Things That Aren't True Anymore is the assertion that "Java Is Slow". Excepting floating-point (where most Java implementations aren't at liberty to use the floating-point hardware), Java is generally as fast or faster than compiled code. Some of the best and brightest have spent years of effort ensuring this, including such things as dynamic recompilation/re-optimization of code based on run-time metrics - something that statically-compiled languages like C or assembler cannot boast.
ASP is sort of the opposite extreme, since the original ASP had to recompile each page request each and every time it was made. ASPX addressed this by allowing retention of the compiled page code. That got rid of a lot of useless overhead.
A more compelling reason to prefer Java over ASPanything/IIS is freedom. A Java/Tomcat webapp will run under almost any OS on almost any hardware. IIS runs on Windows. Period. And for the most part, that also means Intel. Not Sparc, Not zSeries. Maybe you don't care. But then again, maybe next week IBM will offer your employer a can't-refuse deal on a mainframe.
I don't have benchmarks, and there are a lot of things that can make one platform preferable. But I permanently gave up on the "Java is slow" idea when I encountered the Poseidon UML tool with its cool real-time graphics UI and the FreeMind mindmapper tool. A small hit to startup the JVM, but after that, you'd never know what language you were working under.
The great debate. Java vs. .Net.
When .Net first came out there was an application written called "The Pet Shop." Which was a .Net port of Sun's J2EE reference application, "The Pet Store". It was announced that Microsoft's implementation was "faster."
As with anything, especially anything to do with marketing, you have to dig deeper to find the truth.
Any technology can be fast with enough hardware and the correct design.
In my experience there are two factors to speed: What type of hardware is used and how you architect your application (this includes database tuning).
Caching at various levels (response, db, etc.) makes a huge different in responsiveness of a web application. There is also a lot of things that are done to reduce time consuming operations like db connection pooling, sql statement caching, etc. As much as I'd like to say Java is better :-), I think in this case the performance is due to the way Jira was written and the fact that it's being run internally (probably with few users as compared to eBay, Facebook, Microsoft). This site, Stackoverflow, uses ASP.NET MVC and IIS and is very responsive and my guess (since code is not open sourced, yet) is that they use many of the same techniques you would find in Jira or any other web application built to scale.
I think that it is not typically the frameworks and languages used that make an application slow. In my experience, some frameworks like JSF or .NET server side controls give developers alot of freedom to make too many database calls and look things up too often, but that's definitely not the fault of the framework used.
Keep your application as light as possible and focus on keeping the data sent to the client as small as possible, and you will have a fast application. It's usually faster to develop fast applications too.
The Jira folks have written a best in class application (and charge for it) - nice work crocodile dundees.
I also suggest to consider also two aspects:
the maintenance activities: logging and deployment. In my opinion under a unix like server is more easier to log, deploy, and maintain new release than doing the same on a Windows server.
if the project require to use some open source application (i.e. Alfresco repository) Java is better solutions
People's opinion is mostly biased. Most people have never really tried the other while claiming the other is slower. I wouldn't trust any answer: it's mere opinion. It's boring to always read the same 4 cents again and again.
I am the .Net specialist in a consultancy with many difference flavors of developers using many different languages and frameworks. Because everyone is pretty much trying to push their own agendas with our different clients in terms of what technology to propose, I'm constantly finding myself in the classic arguments with them all about "why" .Net may be a better technology solution for a given clients requirements.
Often time here, the debate comes down to the issue of performance. Usually the areas that are argued about here consist of costs, maintainability, and performance. I have a hard time arguing about cost because in general open-source technologies are usually cheaper, and although and can usual put a good word in for .Net in terms of total cost of ownership (It seems to be pretty easy to convince people that .Net applications have relative low costs for maintainability if the application architecture has been thoughtfully designed), we will really only push .Net here if the client understands and is indifferent about the costs associated with Microsoft licensing. In terms of maintainability, like I mentioned before, the other developers here realize how much a difference it can make when an application is thoughtfully designed. I have had around 8 years of experience programming .Net solutions and I'm pretty confident in my ability to present to a client all the features and tool sets that .Net provides to give an application a long, and easy to maintain life span.
So again, what it usually boils down to is an argument over performance. Up until now, I have worked for companies that already used Microsoft development technologies to developer their applications so while I have discussed performance with others in the past I have never been a position where I have had to convince performance. My other co-workers are always boasting about these different website that they go to that show improved performance for open-source web applications. This all being said, what I would like to know from everybody here is where do you usually go to get your information about how may some .Net web applications have out performed other technologies?
Thanks in advance for the advice,
-Matt
I appreciate the detail, though I must say I forgot your question at the end. =)
Anyhow, this is something that has certainly been on my mind in the past. There is always a conflict on what technology is the best. We all know on each side you will find zealots, so it's quite difficult weeding out the facts. Professionally, I've seen successes/disasters on both sides of the fence.
For you, since you have a vested interest in .NET. I would showcase success stories, such as ... (insert whatever big name site you want) Facebook, SO, etc. I'd also find stories where things went wrong on the .NET side and pinpoint the reason. Like you said, it is often poor implementation. I don't know how many DailyWTF stories I've seen with ASP.NET sites behaving poorly but it gets traced back to 1) Poor design 2) Implementation 3) Coding.
Once you have a solid show case to justify the technology you can then of course talk about your own past experiences. You need to qualify yourself as being able to avoid the same pitfalls that your stories exposed.
.NET loses in performance against C/C++. In general, it will win over Python, Ruby, and PHP in baseline performance. The static typing tends translates into faster native code. (There are exceptions, such as Python's hand-tweaked set() performance being faster than HashSets in .NET)
The difference might come down to things like apache vs IIS (and their respective caching configurations), database architecture, etc. Features than can be misused or misunderstood (ViewStates and large GridViews, or using large numbers of hidden WebControls, for example)
Depending on what type of application you are building I've found that performance is rarely an issue. All the technologies out there can perform well enough.
When debating .net versus java/ruby/python etc I usually try to point out other benefits of .net.
There was this one time my boss asked me why .net instead of others? He wanted to know because he could get a PHP programmer for cheap. As part of the report we wrote a simple web application in 4 different languages and the .net app ran the fastest by far. After that we solidified behind .net. This was when .net was new so none of us really knew it well. We came from ASP, PHP, Coldfusion and Java backgrounds.
If you are looking for .Net performance stories you can listen to this dot net rocks show
My company (a large organization) is developing a "road-map" for evolving their rather old, tangled confederation of systems to an SOA model. A few people are pushing hard for using Websphere Integration Developer and Websphere Process Server as the defacto platform for developing future applications...because they feel IBM is a stable vendor, the tools are made for the enterprise, they drank the "business agility" BPEL kool-aid, etc.
Does anyone have positive or negative thoughts on this platform? Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
My experience with the IBM Java tool set is pure pain. Days to install lots of different versions of different components all incompatible with each other, discover a bug in component A get told to update to see if it fixes, updating component A breaks component B and C, get told to update these etc.
I find Eclipse with out the IBM extensions far more stable and quicker and provides more features (as its stable versions are a couple releases ahead of WID/RAD).
I would advise against going the IBM way for development tools. As for process server I have less experience but the people in my team using it seemed to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed WID. not a lot.
So far I havent been impressed by any tools with the "SOA" and/or "BPM" labels on them. My "roadmap" would be very very iterative to see some results with the archetecture as fast as possible while trying to grab some of the easy fruits. That way you gain your feel for what works for you and your people.
I would never let any vendor push me anywhere in the "scuplturing" of the architecture.
I agree with other users complaining about WID. The only reason we are using WID is that a decision was made a while back to use IBM products across the board by our sales department.
That's right, our sales department made the decision to use IBM products.
Development has been painful and frustrating. We have lots of stability problems with Process Server, sometimes it doesn't want to start or shutdown properly. Yeah you can easily draw processes in the IDE, but most any toolset provides that functionality these days. It is nothing special or unique to WID or IBM. IBM is a few iterations behind mainstream.
There are plenty of open source implementations out there that offer great support. Checkout JBoss or RedHat, they are pretty good. If that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Apache tools.
Walter
Developers don't choose WID, WMB, or WPS. Managers do, because IBM is a "stable vendor".
Look at JBoss, or K.I.S.S.
WID/WPS is actually pretty simple. The original intention was for analysts and business people to "compose" services (DO NOT LET THEM DO THIS!) so the UI is simple and easy.
Most of the work will be in defineing and implementing the back end services which depending on the platform will mostly involve wrapping existing code in SOA service.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that SOAP is technoligy and SOA is an architecture and a state of mind.
There is a zen to a succesful SOA implementation. Its all about "business services", if you have a service that you cannot describe to a business user in less than six words you have done it wrong! Ideally the service name alone should be enough to describe the functionality of the service.
If you end up with a service called "MyApp.GetContactData" described as "get name, addresses tel fax etc." then you are there. If You have a service called MyAppGetFaxNoFromOldSys" described as "Retrieve current-fax-nmbr from telephony table in legacy system" you are doomed!
Incidently most of the Websphere tooling for WS* is pretty nice. But I would recommend the very wonderful SAOPUI tool from http://www.eviware.com which is very good for compsing/reading WSDL based messages and also function as a useful test client or server.
Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
As a Developer, I find the tools at varying levels of being bug free. 6.0.1 was a pain, 6.2 is so much better. But once you develop with the tool, there is minimal effort to maintain it. I develop in hours what java developers take days to do. It is also easy to maintain as changes can be made very quickly. I cannot answer your question from the perspective of an architect or a Manager but i would agree with comments of some others here.