My outlook for a happy 2007
Check out this eBay page, http://my.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyeBay, pay attention to the upper right corner, it says "Powered by SUN Java Technology".
But unfortunately, the site is obviously running Microsoft Windows with IIS server and ISAPI. Java has earned the reputation of being a slow memory hog. At least at the front end, eBay is running Windows.
IT Kitty Cat wrote that the blog-sphere is getting duller -- I felt the same too. When there were fierce battles, we all paid attention to the news of war. I like to watch the History Channel. Some say History Channel is the war channel, that's very true. Wars decide the major evolution events of the human history. In the computing world, the epic struggle between AMD and Intel entered a period of trench war-- we see attrition. The major movements and manuvers have been done. AMD is rapidly building up its forces behind the lines for the final assault against its anxious foe. The silence is deafening.
Looking forward, we see only two viable CPU architectures: One is AMD64 with Direct Connect and Accelerated Architecture, the other is IBM's Power architecture. The AMD64 will rule all general purpose computing with massive I/O capability, integer performance and ultra high FP power. The Power architecture may rule the gaming market. The two can co-exist, as we have seen from IBM's Opteron+Cell combination.
In terms of 64 bit operating platform, we also see only two viable architectures for enterprise. Microsoft Windows and Linux. Both have wide hardware vendor support, both are highly usable. Linux was viewed a movement against Microsoft monopoly, but, it's an open platform that does not shy away from adapting the good elements of Windows. I also expect Linux to adopt some of Solaris 10 or even Mac OS's strength. All other alternatives will be irrelevant. Any attempt to halt Linux will be futile.
In software development, we expect the GPLed Java to become more widely used. Compared to C++, Java's portability and rich class libraries are unbeatable advantages. But C++ is probably 20x faster, or in other words, Java makes your 2GHZ CPU run at an equivalent of 100MHZ. I expect the open source community to vastly improve the speed of Java and make it more usable.
The rest of the IT hardware vendors will be a bunch of assemblers who take offshelf parts and put labels on boxes. There will be very little to distinguish between one vendor from the other.
We will see the above trend with more clarity in 2007.
posted by Sharikou, Ph. D. @ 12/25/2006 12:20:00 PM
9 Comments:
Ebay buys Sun servers, so it has put up that blurb on its site.
It's a possibility that it uses Java as it has become a de facto standard for business these days. Anyway, Sun has a habit of putting Java in front of everything they produce. They might have insisted Ebay use Java logo
In terms of 64 bit operating platform, we also see only two viable architectures for enterprise. Microsoft Windows and Linux. Both have wide hardware vendor support, both are highly usable. Linux was viewed a movement against Microsoft monopoly, but, it's an open platform that does not shy away from adapting the good elements of Windows. I also expect Linux to adopt some of Solaris 10 or even Mac OS's strength. All other alternatives will be irrelevant. Any attempt to halt Linux will be futile.
Neither Linux nor Microsoft have the carrier grade quality that Solaris has. You cannot leave out Solaris and Mac OS X. Linux as a software platform is a joke. Mac OS X would have a better chance if they tried. Things are looking interesting on the Open Solaris front. If people are happy to move to Mac OS X, were happy to use OS2/Warp, I do not see any reason why Open Solaris should not have a chance on the desktop...
Neither Linux nor Microsoft have the carrier grade quality that Solaris has.
So called carrier grade quality is crappy hype, as I have shown in the previous posts.
Oh man, for an freelance IT journalist, your journalistic skills like inquiry and objectivity seems to be vastly underdeveloped:
1. To you "software quality" matter. Nobody runs an operating system with any decent service level aggreement on unsupported hardware. So do your self a favour and and look at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ . Unter this link you will find all supported systems and two tools to test compatibility for unsupported systems.
2. Well, for an Ph.D. you are very naive person. Do you really believe, that ebay runs on Windows. Or didn´t you heard before of "reverse proxies". You should have a look on http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/ebay.xml
Well, perhaps the "reverse proxy"-thing was done as an decoy for people like you, who think that netcraft says anything about the infrastructure of a website.
3. The "Java is Slow"-thing is so old and so untrue, that i don´t comment it any longerr.
Do you really believe, that ebay runs on Windows. Or didn´t you heard before of "reverse proxies".
I know folks at ebay writing ISAPI code. The URL I posted at least shows eBay is running Windows for their edge servers. eBay started doing some Java with IBM's technology, but the complaint I hear is Java is too slow--which is just a common observation. Even SUN's own web site is very slow sometimes--though I am not sure it's running Java.
Solaris 10 and Java, like most of SUN's technologies, are very good ideas, but SUN lacks the discipline to turn them into solid products. Other people do the work 100x better. BEA's J2EE implementation wins hands down against iplanet--SUN's app server market share is near zero. Their JVM is also vastly superior. SUN tried to monetize Java but failed. SUN had an army of lawyers who threaten people who use Java without the (TM), now it has to GPL Java.
SUN still has a six month window of oppurtunity to fix Solaris 10--before others successfully port Solaris 10 features over to their own OS. Beyond that, SUN won't have another chance.
The Ebay link Joerg M. posted makes it clear Ebay has benefited after using Java and Solaris 10.
Particulary this :
"n 2000, eBay’s previous C++ development environment was running low on energy in the face of accelerating growth, so the online marketplace poured itself a big cup of Java and never looked back. Now more than a thousand eBay software developers get their daily programming fix with Java. And thanks to Java’s inherent portability, eBay can move to new hardware to take advantage of new technology, packaging or pricing, knowing that its massive investment in software won’t go down the drain."
As for Solaris 10, it is now the #1 selling Unix server flavour according to latest study and OpenSolaris community is thriving.
The Ebay link Joerg M. posted makes it clear Ebay has benefited after using Java and Solaris 10.
The SUN page says eBay replaced some database servers with T2000 , replaced some search servers with X4100. The question is how many.
Jeesh, besides that you know almost nothing about Solaris you also don't know anything about Java. Java was 20x slower in 1.1 version, current 1.6 is often as fast as C++ unles you need some heavy nubmer crunchign and refuse to offload it to native libraries.
Or could you actually give some links to places where it is said that Java really is as crappy as you said?
"Mac OS X would have a better chance if they tried"
They should also fix their thread handling so it wouldn't have even crappier scaling than XP.
"I know folks at ebay writing ISAPI code."
... and MS has a whole Linux/Unux lab. So what?
"but the complaint I hear is Java is too slow"
Who does that complaining? Our customers sure doesn't when we code some Java applications for them.
"BEA's J2EE implementation wins hands down against iplanet--SUN's app server market share is near zero. Their JVM is also vastly superior"
Perhaps because it is "the first high performance Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimized to run on Intel platforms"? Though I doubt it really is better than Sun's own implementation.
Well, keeping in mind that a single T2000 box has 8 cores for one processor and a lot of throughput, it is reasonable to expect that ebay would have thrown out a lot of servers and replaced them with far few T2000s. They are busy saving on electric bill now! Similarly, with operations requiring fast single thread performance they'd have replaced many boxes with a few x4100s and got better performance.
osgeek
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