4 ms·

Have you ever tried keeping a web application running? It's hard. About as close as we've gotten to doing it well is the plain-old PHP and Apache httpd stack. I

by jchrisa 16y ago

Have you ever tried keeping a web application running? It's hard. About as close as we've gotten to doing it well is the plain-old PHP and Apache httpd stack. I've written PHP apps that stay up for years as long as I pay the bill. I was never able to get anywhere close to that reliability from other web stacks. CouchApps aim to be simpler and more reliable, so that eventually end-users can deploy and perhaps even create them.

eftpotrm 16y ago
I've built and deployed more ASP / SQL Server (or occasionally Access!) than I care to remember; I'm doing more ASP.Net now, after some time on desktop apps in between. Either way, I've never had reliability issues.
kunley 16y ago
Not playing devil's advocate here, but a deep concern: Today's world is full of programmers posing as production administrators, while the solution is to employ administrators and move on. I've seen so many production failures because of admin-posed programmers wishful thinking or not having a sufficiently broad perspective to prepare themselves for the disaster. It was regardless if it was a simple Apache+PHP, hairy Weblogic+Oracle stack or some new sexy Erlangish stuff. I have nothing against programmers and I am both admin & programmer myself, but many (most?) coders just lack some operational perspective & experience. Is is possible that selling new solutions as "don't plan, deploy & pray" will make this trend worse?
- jchrisa 16y ago
  The important thing to keep in mind is that by "deploy" I mean "install" -- the goal is to make CouchApps as easy to share / replicate / install on end-user devices like cellphones and laptops. Once you have a fully replicating application, you want to run it as close to the user as possible to avoid network latency. I don't think the deployment challenges of large centralized apps will go away, but there are a lot of apps that better fit the decentralized model. Now that CouchDB makes decentralized web apps possible, we'll get to see what can be done.

by jchrisa 16y ago

eftpotrm 16y ago

I've built and deployed more ASP / SQL Server (or occasionally Access!) than I care to remember; I'm doing more ASP.Net now, after some time on desktop apps in between. Either way, I've never had reliability issues.

kunley 16y ago

Not playing devil's advocate here, but a deep concern: Today's world is full of programmers posing as production administrators, while the solution is to employ administrators and move on. I've seen so many production failures because of admin-posed programmers wishful thinking or not having a sufficiently broad perspective to prepare themselves for the disaster. It was regardless if it was a simple Apache+PHP, hairy Weblogic+Oracle stack or some new sexy Erlangish stuff. I have nothing against programmers and I am both admin & programmer myself, but many (most?) coders just lack some operational perspective & experience. Is is possible that selling new solutions as "don't plan, deploy & pray" will make this trend worse?

jchrisa 16y ago
The important thing to keep in mind is that by "deploy" I mean "install" -- the goal is to make CouchApps as easy to share / replicate / install on end-user devices like cellphones and laptops. Once you have a fully replicating application, you want to run it as close to the user as possible to avoid network latency. I don't think the deployment challenges of large centralized apps will go away, but there are a lot of apps that better fit the decentralized model. Now that CouchDB makes decentralized web apps possible, we'll get to see what can be done.