Well, not really underground. Just some notes in general.
VB use is slipping – according to a news.com story, the use of Visual Basic is slipping. While this is not that surprising to me (software has grown up – and passed up VB in many ways), the interesting part is what users are moving toward: 39% who are decreasing VB use will be turning to C#, while only 31% will turn to Java. While C# is a MS product – and right in Visual Studio – it’s still a bit surprising because Java has been around so long, and C# (MS’s answer to Java, essentially) is so new. On the other hand, who are those VB developers? Those using Visual Studio, those MCSE (or whatever it is…) — the Microsofties. So I guess it’s not that surprising…but should alarm Sun a bit… Like ’em or hate ’em, MS does a good job of keeping developers and keeping them happy. When Java was a potential point where MS could lose developers, MS developed their own Java – C#. Keeps the defections down.
The world in two (mebbe three) servers – The May, 2003 Netcraft server survey is out, and no surprises. Apache and MS both way ahead of the pack and essentially flat over the past few months in terms of percentage gain/loss. Apache is the leader by far, but my guess is that higher-volume sites (example: Dell.com) make the number of pages served up by Apache and IIS pretty much equal. Apache runs a lot of small sites (and some really large ones, I know, I know….), and IIS is generally not used unless the company is large enough to have a fair-sized Web site (otherwise why pay all that – whether you need it or not – to MS for licenses etc??). The interesting part to me is the plunge — pretty consistent over the past few years — of Netscape servers. Netscape servers were never high in physical site numbers, but ran large sites (such as cars.com), so the pages-served metric worked like the one for IIS today. But the number is soooo small. I think Sun is dying…
Microsoft Project – According to another news.com story, MS is updating its Project tool and moving more (all?) of it onto the Web (in the form of a server, I assume, like Exchange for Outlook integration) so collaboration can be more seamless. Well, file that under DUH!. That’s always been one of my main complaints against MS Project (the other — too frickin’ non-intuitive): There is an owner of the project plan (hopefully…) that makes the updates and then spams everyone on the team with this huge file. And there are too many phone conferences where you can hear people saying: “Was it the one on this e-mail Tuesday??” “no, that one had a mistake, use the Monday 2pm one…” and so on. Obviously, putting the plan on a shared drive is better, but for folks outside the firewall??? This is a tool that cries out to be a Web app, or at least — like Exchange/Outlook — something that can be accessed off a server by a client program.
CSS flak attack – There have been a lot of electrons zipping around the Internet backbone recently carrying information – pro and con – about CSS (see previous blog; May 3, 2003). It’s been a pretty polarized argument, for the most part. There have been some pragmatic reports that I’ve read (links that are lost in some ancient history bin), but for the most part I’ve been seeing a lot of one of the two following points of view:
1) I can’t make CSS (do something). Therefore, CSS sucks. Why use it?
2) You Luddite, just stand on your head, rub your belly, assign a karma:good attribute to [whatever] and it will work unless you have SP4 installed….
Yes, both arguments are silly. But both are valid, to a degree. CSS is the future (like it or not), yet it has serious limitations today for whatever reasons (get over it). Good to have the debate because it needs to be had. Will move things in (hopefully) a constructive direction once the dust settles.