I've used Oracle Web Server, Netscape Livewire and Microsoft Active Server Pages extensively. I'd have to say that my favorite of the three is Oracle Web Server.I used Oracle WOW, which was the shareware version of Web Server--before Oracle wised up and realized there was money to be made, for over a year. We connected to Netscape web servers. I was with Booz Allen, a consulting firm, where my team built a "Knowledge System" for collecting and distributing intellectual capital all over the world. This huge system runs from redundant Sparc 1000s (Web Servers) and Alpha 2100s(RDBMS).
From a programmers perspective, It is a great product because it gives you--the programmer--total control. Unfortunately, this made it difficult to involve our graphics designer (a non-programmer) in the creation of the system.
Livewire and ASP, which I am currently working with, are far less complicated, and allow you to involve non-programmers to a greater degree. I would go with ASP simply because fighting Microsoft has always been a futile effort.
Now, I prefer working in UNIX, but Microsoft's "Internet Studio" is a very user-friendly environment for building web-RDBMS systems.
-- James Tarquin, May 13, 1997
You write: Well, Microsoft had the same thought years ago and came up with an abstraction barrier between application code and databases called ODBC".In fairness, ODBC is largely derived from the work of the X/Open and SQL Access Group. MS took their specification, changed its name, made minor technical changes and promoted it as an open standard mainly to to give itself an advantage over other established dbms vendors. I think MS deserves more credit for opening up the dbms tools market than for being technically innovative.
-- Cimarron Taylor, May 26, 1997
i'm a microsoft employee (hey, that tomatoe hurt!) and would like to admit that up front. a friend of mine said that phil's book disparaged MS. I'd say the review on this page didn't do that; it simply plead ignorance of MS's IIS/ASP package. after reading phil's issues with the other packages, i'd venture to say that phil would like the MS IIS/ASP solution the best. it scales: the web-server is multi-threaded, and pages are cached after being read from disk. it uses easy to understand scripting languages (JScript, VBScript, etc). scripts can contain logic, looping, variable declaration, function declaration, and branching. database access is trivial, and any data source--rdbms, mainframes, object databases, directories, email systems...--can be accessed with the built-in database objects. pages can be "transacted": all work done on one page is part of a "transaction": committed or aborted in one action. and it uses COM, so a script can access any COM object available. Among other purposes, COM objects have been developed for file system access, SMTP sendmail, shopping packages, email access, etc.i can't give my name because i might get in trouble. will check this with my lawyer. however, i honestly believe IIS is the best web server out there. check it out.
-- anonymous anonymous, January 20, 1998
NetDynamicsYou say down with middleware. However ODBC is quite useful middleware. We are using NetDynamics middleware. We are building Databases backed web sites with NetDynamics. It does all that you ask for in terms of caching database connections and not requiring a new process each hit. We do have some performance and bug issues, it chews up heaps of resources, is expensive, there is quite a learning curve and you have to understand quite a bit about how the web works to get the most from it. Many other competing application servers exist with these features (Sybase has one). The Java servlet protocol also helps here.
-- Brendan Johnston, March 2, 1998
On the subject of RDBMS security, the free PostgreSQL (from about version 6.0 on) allows restricting TCP connections to particular IP addresses. In fact, PgSQL allows much more than that; check out http://www.postgresql.org for more info.
-- Lamar Owen, April 6, 1998
I've been working with NT 4 for about 2 years now. At work, my main directory server is a Micron Netframe, and can say, to my amazement, that the server only needs rebooting every 60 to 90 days. (BIG recomendation of Micron for anyone using NT. Detected every bit of hardware I've thrown at them, and even the common MS crashes aren't that fatal.) It carries 8 to 9 gig of various stuff for only about 40 employees, but it stays up a lot longer that any workstation does. While I'm not near a Microsoft fan, I really like using ASP. It would have to be one of the easiest ways to access a db i've seen. We haven't used SQL Server yet, as we are still accessing MS Access files, but the response times are quick. I know that 40 people isn't near the volume of any low-end website, but big scale performance isn't a factor for us at this point. On the usability side, ASP is the way to go for me.
-- Gary Dickerson, September 6, 1998
Speaking of $10K spending on firewall: save that money for Accura NSX down payment by using IPfilter package from http://cheops.anu.edu.au/~avalon/ which would allow you to restrict connections to your database server, web server, etc. It comes as part of FreeBSD, and can be used on other Unix systems.
-- Dmitry Kohmanyuk, July 17, 1999