Geek alert! This article is for Slicehost geeks only.

Talk about playing on the edge, I almost fell off this time. I have eight slices (virtual servers, that is) on Slicehost (which is now owned by Rackspace) and believe me they are tiny!^[1] But they can serve low-volume to medium-volume web sites pretty well. For instance, Shaping Youth (several thousand visitors a day) and GirlsHorseClub are on these little servers and they serve up pretty rapidly.^[2] Nice thing about Slicehost is that any host can be scaled up from the tiny size to 16x that size, and because it’s cloud computing, you can also bring up multiple instances of any server and have them share load. This allows me to implement the traditional three-tiered architecture (web/application/database) quite well without having to worry about whether my servers will be able to handle the load because I can scale ’em up whenever I need to.

But, the catch is that when you start with the tiniest slice (256MB RAM) you really have to fine-tune your operating system and applications in order to get good performance out of them.

This has led me to some fun discoveries about 1) how to make Apache work in a really tight space; 2) how to add additional web serving using NGINX (engine-X); 3) how to run MySQL in less space; and finally 4) how to use Java and Tomcat wedged into a non-existent memory slice.

Today’s lesson for me was installing Tomcat 5.5 on Slicehost. I started by reading How to Install Tomcat on Ubuntu in the mkyong blog. Not bad at all. The essence is to first find out what version of Tomcat is available on your slice:

sudo apt–cache search tomcat

Then install that version and the admin app for it:

apt–get ––fix–missing install tomcat5.5
apt–get ––fix–missing install tomcat5.5-webapps
apt–get ––fix–missing install tomcat5.5-admin

Then I like to have /usr/local/tomcat defined (like on all my other servers):

ln –s /usr/share/tomcat5.5/server/ /usr/local/tomcat

That was about all it took. It serves by default on port 8180 – and the admin app was there and ready to go. My next step was to port a Java app that I have been running on bigger servers over to this little server. That actually worked quite well, requiring about 6 hours to port, recompile (to eliminate a few warnings) and test.

[2] These two slices actually had to be boosted to 512MB recently in order to handle anticipated high traffic. But I can reduce their size after the stress-out period passes.

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In 1999 to 2001 I was responsible for purchasing Oracle licenses for a large organization with large plans. We paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (US) for initial and continuing licenses on Oracle database software. The stuff was industrial-strength. But since then I’ve used (the free) MySQL dozens of times for small-to-medium size sites. And several systems I’ve used or designed have been Java-based as well. The availability of these free tools is critical to the existence of millions of web sites around the world.

My guess is that we will see the current versions of both Java and MySQL continue to be available free-of-charge, but that at some point future versions of each may be offered only under paid licenses, though I predict that these licenses will not be rapaciously priced. And I think this is more likely for MySQL than for Java. Some others agree with me that Oracle will treat MySQL as an entry-level system and use various methods to get developers to migrate to Oracle systems over time.

In terms of Java, well Java’s direction is governed by a user-centered community – the Java Community Process. Java is open source. We don’t know whether Oracle will (continue to) support this open source process. Oracle already has invested a lot in development using Java and strongly supported it while it was championed by Sun. So the consensus is that they won’t kill Java. And it seems to me that people are cautiously optimistic about the potential for Oracle’s continued support of Java.

Let’s see how this plays out.

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Zend’s CEO, Andi Gutmans, claims that PHP is disrupting Java. Meaning that PHP has gotten a significant toehold and is dislodging Java from its position as the granddaddy of server-side web applications frameworks[1]. I take the word disrupting in its modern sense of disruptive technology – a technology that significantly differs from the standard paradigm and whose effect would have been hard to predict, based on the “rules” of the standard paradigm.

I am a long-time Java-user (9 years) and I agree that PHP is a real contender in the web applications sphere… and would like to make some additional observations.

I suppose that if you don’t know what PHP and Java are, you might consider this article total gibberish. So let’s fix that. If you’d like to read up and learn about PHP and Java, try Wikipedia [PHP] and [Java] articles for starters.

Here’s additional elucidation…

PHP: … is a programming language that is embedded within web pages (on the server) whose purpose is to embody the “logic” of the web application and ultimately emit HTML pages. When PHP statements are executed they do things like connect to databases, make computations, and modify and format the information for display on the web page. Ultimately the output is HTML (and javascript) like any other page. PHP developed as a scripting language, and one characteristic of scripting is that the server “interprets” (or compiles) each PHP page from scratch each time the page is requested by a web browser. That’s each time a page is requested. That makes for quick development and modification of PHP pages, but it’s not very efficient from the standpoint of server efficiency.

Java: Similarly, Java language statements can be embedded in web pages (on the server) to connect to databases, read files, and modify and format information for display.  Java provides (runs within) a framework^[1] that precompiles its programming language statements to a compact form which can be very quickly executed by the server. One common framework is Java Server Pages [JSP] running under the control of systems like JBoss or Tomcat. The other big difference, compared to PHP, is that Java pages (JSP pages in my case) are “persistent” and once a page is compiled and then loaded, it stays in memory and can be executed super-quickly for thousands of viewers without recompilation or reloading – while PHP pages have to be compiled for each of the thousands of viewers.

And the bottom line is that Zend, the company, provides an “optimizer” and its own framework that vastly improves the performance of PHP pages, thus making PHP much more competitive with Java. So Andi is right. PHP is really disrupting Java’s hold on the web application market.

Working in the cloud^[2], as I do now, I have found it’s easier to find a cloud supplier who provides a PHP right-out-of-the-box solution than a Java solution. Or maybe it’s just easier to configure PHP (like on the Ubuntu Linux servers I use at Slicehost). But Slicehost is promising us a Java solution soon. Probably more important, Google has announced they’re workin’ on a Java solution to be positioned within their App Engine and I see more and more clients using Google Apps every day.

So what’s the bottom line? PHP has really come up the curve, especially with the Zend Framework and Zend Server in the picture. I’d say that development progresses a little faster in PHP than in Java – while you’re developing the database and other support – but when you’re developing the PHP or JSP pages themselves, the two approaches get pretty similar traction. During development and debugging, you can make a change to a page and instantly view the result of your change. Once you’ve deployed the solution and there are thousands of users, then the Java-based app is probably a bit easier on the server and has greater capacity.

[1] A framework is a set of cooperating programs that together provide underlying support services for a computer application (“application” in the sense of a computer program that gets some big task done). I’m talking about web applications here – meaning applications running on big servers in the cloud and used by people through web browsers.

[2] Cloud computing is “computing as a service” without the customer having to worry about servers or other hardware – you just purchase as much computing as you need.

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Use Linux! Use Windows because everyone else does and Microsoft isn’t going to go away. Use Java because it runs everywhere. Use Plone/Zope. Use Drupal. Use Open Source. Use commercial products because they’re well-supported. Use Freeware.

On and on we go, extolling the virtues of the various software systems we might use to build a new web site for our particular community of practice.

It’s a fun discussion for geeks everywhere. Promoting our favorite systems. (Mine is Java and ODBC databases.) But, where does it get us in the NPO world?

Well, frequently we build our fancy systems and “nobody comes to the party.” The system is up and running (perhaps except for some small component that “I’ll fix next week”) and the community never arrives or starts using the wonderful tool we’ve put in place.

What happened? Was this a waste of time for us, or did we benefit from all of the learning about the new software system? (I did one of these last week where I learned how to install an SSL digital certificate – it took me alot of time and I learned a lot, and now something really wonderful, all transmissions to and from the computer can be encrypted! – but will anyone use it?)

How can we avoid this terrible waste of time? If such it is.

Well, I contend that the solution is called “analysis and planning.” The analysis portion involves getting your community of potential users together and asking them “what do you really want to do, or what do you expect this online system to support your doing in the real world? Think about and answer this question from the human standpoint.” Are you expecting the system to support an interchange of ideas among a community of 50 people? If so, then are all those people online? Are they all willing to check the web site every day? Are they talkative and knowledgeable and will they contribute to the common store of knowledge that will be accumulating at the web site?

The planning portion involves looking at the “workflow” of the process. That is, determining who will be in charge of suppling the information needed by the system, how that information will flow thru drafting, writing, approval, publication, maintenance/updating, and eventually deletion. What’s the use of having a big powerful content-management system, for instance, to manage the creation and dissemination of newsletters, if you dont’ have someone who will reliably create the newsletter? And someone who will be there to edit them and polish them and make them readable? And to send them out to the population of users when the time is appropriate?

So, let me stress that this planning activity, and the examination of the human systems that will surround your technology-based system once it’s in operation, is probably even more important than the choice of software tool.

[Note that I’ve include a number of reference to WikiPedia in this entry. It’s a great place to explore some of these concepts, get some ideas, and then branch out to more detailed explanations.]

[Minor edits 2009-04-16]

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