"It's important for Java deployments to run on Windows," he said. "If you look at Web services, it's all about interoperability."
The need to interoperate and cut costs led Sherwin Lu of Le Petite Academy to install the JBoss software on top of Windows
Server 2003 last year. Lu, director of application infrastructure at the Chicago-based preschool chain, said moving from a
Visual Basic 6 development environment to J2EE "felt a little risky." But the cost of training his staff on J2EE was about
the same as it would have been if he had upgraded to a .Net infrastructure.
Moreover, by adopting JBoss rather than proprietary application servers, Lu figured that he saved about US$1 million in license
fees alone. And he said that by staying on Windows, he avoided the pain and cost of hiring an all-new systems administration
and support team.
In another sign of the growing interest in WAMP setups, at least 12 bundles of the required open-source products are now available
to be downloaded and installed on Windows servers. For example, the XAMPP installer created by Berlin programmer Kai Seidler
is available for Windows as well as for Linux and other operating systems, including Solaris and Mac OS X. Thus far, more
than 80 percent of its 3 million downloads have been made by Windows users, Seidler said. Even Web servers -- a longtime sweet
spot for the LAMP stack -- are increasingly being run on Windows hardware, according to Mark Brewer, CEO of Covalent Technologies
in Walnut Creek, Calif.
Covalent provides support services to users of The Apache Software Foundation's open-source products. Brewer said almost one-third
of the customers his company supports on the Apache Tomcat server are running the software on Windows. "That had been 15 percent
to 20 percent historically," Brewer said at last week's O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore.
In addition, nearly one-fifth of Covalent's customers run Apache's flagship Web server on Windows. Brewer said he thinks that
figure is equally significant, considering that Microsoft bundles its Internet Information Server software with Windows Server.
But Microsoft's ability to integrate its own back-end products with Windows gives it a big edge over open-source insurgents
in general, said Mike Olson, vice president of embedded technologies at Oracle and former CEO of Sleepycat Software. Sleepycat,
which Oracle acquired in February, developed the open-source Berkeley DB embedded database. But, Olson said, "if I've already
got Microsoft [technology] installed on my Windows server box, why would I bother to throw it away and install something else?"
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
