Enterprise grade software is an euphemism
Thursday, December 4th, 2008I recently had to restart a Java webapplication because somehow the JDBC connection to the database server was hanging completely. This reminded me of a sentence a friend of mine told me during the OpenCms Days 2008.
“Enterprise software just means that it’s targeted at customers who can afford the guy who restarts the application server every few hours.”
I had to laugh because while the quote is clearly cynical it has a true core. Especially if you compare languages like Java and PHP it’s true that PHP doesn’t have these kind problems. This is mostly because of the throw-away-the-state nature of PHP. After every served request PHP forgets what it’s done before and has to completely rebuild the working environment at the next request. Java in contrast is able to remember things between requests. Which makes it more powerful but also harder to maintain (more state, more problems). I’m really not sure if I’m buying into this enterprise-thing anymore. Especially if you need scalability you definitely want to keep application state at a minimum and without state you don’t really need those big interconnected clusters of application servers any more.
Here is a nice talk about scalability and serious (speak enterprise) languages I found recently. It’s from Cal Henderson a software development guy at Flickr. It’s really worth watching. Even if you’re not into Python and Django.
(Watch it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk&feature=PlayList&p=D415FAF806EC47A1&index=10)
