| Spot on - you nailed it. The end user counts here, big time. A lot of the products out there would have precisely zero traction if they required literally hours of piddling around. If you compare it to JVM based commercial offerings, and I'll pick Crucible as an example here, it requires: 1. Find a working JVM that matches it. 2. Piddle around with PATH settings and JAVA_HOMEW. 3. Unzip it. 4. Lots of database configuration. 5. Frig around with ACLs.on disk so it can actually write to its home directory. 6. Frigging around getting it to run as a service using a JVM service wrapper or init script that you have to write yourself. 7. Extensive backup/restore scripting. 8. Hours of dredging through Atlassian's shitty web site. 9. Fuck around with Tomcat to persuade it to work behind a proxy. 10. Set up an IIS ARR or apache AJP/HTTP proxy in front so you can serve it on a decent URL or port. This applies to anything with stateful that requires any intevention other than copying files. That includes Python, Ruby, .Net (which is less painful I will say), Java, Scala, Clojure, common LISP. You name it. The only things that it doesn't occur on are: ASP, PHP. Most stuff in PHP is: 1. Unzip. 2. SFTP it up 3. Change the connection info in config.php 4. Run install.php and follow instructions. 5. Done. People don't care about nginx vs fastcgi vs apache vs this vs that. They just want it to work and PHP gives a viable and simple solution to that. |