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 | | From: | Curious Pete | | Subject: | Need Advice on Linux vs. Windows for a Database-Driven Web Application | | Date: | 18 Jan 2005 17:47:52 -0800 |
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 | Hi there. I am hoping that someone here can offer me some database
advice.
I work at a small company that makes frozen products that are sold in
supermarkets. We recently hired sales reps in several cities in the US
and Canada to maintain our displays in stores and to take orders from
those stores. Each rep visits 12 stores a day and take a digital photo
of our display at each store. Then they go home, write up an email to
us about the situation at each store, attach the digital photos to the
emails, and send it to us. Then they write emails to the local
distributors containing their orders for the day and send them,
cc'ing us.
The system is working well, except as we add more and more sales reps,
the flow of information into the Head Office is becoming a raging
torrent, and frankly we can't keep up with it. So, we came up with
the great idea to automate the entire process via a database-driven web
application. The idea is that the sales reps should be able to log
into a site, enter a user name and password, then enter and upload
their report, photos and orders for the day, which would thereafter be
stored in a database that we could access from the Head Office.
There is a lot of data to input: Store Name, Street Address, City, Zip,
Store Contact etc. etc., plus all our various distributors and
individual products. We figure that the system should be robust enough
to handle at least fifty sales reps covering a total of 3,750 stores.
We sent RFPs to several software companies and received several bids
back. Okay, here comes the question part: Roughly half the bidders
want to use Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP while the other half wants to use
Microsoft/IIS/MS SQLServer/.NET. (We are currently running a Microsoft
server in the office, but if it was cheap enough, I suppose we could
add another server running LINUX.)
My question is: Which solution is "better", and, from my
(user's) point of view, do I even care? (The software-building costs
are about the same for both types of system.)
I am looking for a robust system that will last our company for several
years, that can be added to as we think of more bells and whistles, and
that will need minimum maintenance.
Thank you in advance!
Curious Pete
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| | From: | Jerry Gitomer | | Subject: | Re: Need Advice on Linux vs. Windows for a Database-Driven Web Application | | Date: | Wed, 19 Jan 2005 13:50:46 GMT |
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| Curious Pete wrote:
> Hi there. I am hoping that someone here can offer me some database
> advice.
>
> I work at a small company that makes frozen products that are sold in
> supermarkets. We recently hired sales reps in several cities in the US
> and Canada to maintain our displays in stores and to take orders from
> those stores. Each rep visits 12 stores a day and take a digital photo
> of our display at each store. Then they go home, write up an email to
> us about the situation at each store, attach the digital photos to the
> emails, and send it to us. Then they write emails to the local
> distributors containing their orders for the day and send them,
> cc'ing us.
>
> The system is working well, except as we add more and more sales reps,
> the flow of information into the Head Office is becoming a raging
> torrent, and frankly we can't keep up with it. So, we came up with
> the great idea to automate the entire process via a database-driven web
> application. The idea is that the sales reps should be able to log
> into a site, enter a user name and password, then enter and upload
> their report, photos and orders for the day, which would thereafter be
> stored in a database that we could access from the Head Office.
>
> There is a lot of data to input: Store Name, Street Address, City, Zip,
> Store Contact etc. etc., plus all our various distributors and
> individual products. We figure that the system should be robust enough
> to handle at least fifty sales reps covering a total of 3,750 stores.
>
> We sent RFPs to several software companies and received several bids
> back. Okay, here comes the question part: Roughly half the bidders
> want to use Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP while the other half wants to use
> Microsoft/IIS/MS SQLServer/.NET. (We are currently running a Microsoft
> server in the office, but if it was cheap enough, I suppose we could
> add another server running LINUX.)
>
> My question is: Which solution is "better", and, from my
> (user's) point of view, do I even care? (The software-building costs
> are about the same for both types of system.)
>
> I am looking for a robust system that will last our company for several
> years, that can be added to as we think of more bells and whistles, and
> that will need minimum maintenance.
> Thank you in advance!
>
> Curious Pete
>
I think you are about to start a flame war. Having said that
all I can tell you is that if I was doing it I would use
Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP).
I believe that a LAMP based system is more stable and less
subject to attacks from the jerks that write worms and virii (I
guess that's the plural of virus).
I also believe that when using LAMP there is more of a
separation between your application software and the system
software. The effect of this separation is that is allows you
to change the underlying system software components without
impacting your application. (I have applications I wrote in C
and as Unix shell scripts over fifteen years ago that I am
still using with a current version of Linux.)
I have just completed the initial release of a LAMP based
application that has over 55 input data forms written in PHP, 10
MySQL tables, and another 80 PHP processing programs. I have
found it to be a very easy application to maintain and modify.
The application has been run on four different versions of Linux
and Sun Solaris, using three different versions of PHP, and two
versions of MySQL and I have only had to make one change in my
PHP source to accommodate the system software changes (I had to
add a statement to explicitly specify the name of the include
directory for one of the two web hosting services that I use.)
HTH
Jerry
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| | From: | Mike Albanese | | Subject: | Re: Need Advice on Linux vs. Windows for a Database-Driven Web Application | | Date: | Fri, 21 Jan 2005 13:44:00 -0500 |
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| Curious Pete wrote:
> My question is: Which solution is "better", and, from my
> (user's) point of view, do I even care? (The software-building costs
> are about the same for both types of system.)
IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino product might be an option here, too. Not
relational, but excels at this type of application. Superb security and
replication, and can easily handle nonstructured or semi-structured data
(emails, photos, drawings, etc.) that can be more difficult to work with
in a purely relational setting. Servers can also run on Linux.
Mike
--
(for email address, change 'pacific' to 'atlantic')
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