Despite Linux being to all intents and purposes, a free operating system, confirmation of its growing popularity as an application server platform can be found in sales figures, according to Jeremy Matthews, MD of enterprise software and host system Web-enablement specialist, Dax Data.
"This was well illustrated when Allaire announced that, within six months of the release of the product, it had sold one thousand copies of ColdFusion 4.5 Server for Linux. This appears to indicate that, while devotees are happy to use standard open source tools for ordinary Web and email servers, some prefer ColdFusion when building and delivering e-commerce and enterprise systems for the Internet," he says.
Matthews contends that this phenomenon is proof positive that open source products can co-exist with the more traditional variety, citing value add as the primary criterion.
"ColdFusion runs natively on Unix and delivers enterprise features such as service-level fail-over, integration with Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and expanded XML support. This offers Linux customers the ability to achieve high availability and improved performance on large-scale applications as well as enhanced integration with new and existing enterprise business systems," he explains.
His point is supported by Infonautics, a provider of personalised information agents and Web sites that recently relaunched the Sports Sleuth Website (http://www.SportsSLEUTH.com). ColdFusion for Linux powers the site`s entire cluster of over 20 servers.
Chief technical officer of Infonautics, Ram Mohan, is reported to have said that the company selected ColdFusion for reasons of reliability, rapid development capabilities and scalability. Matthews confirms this: "During some of the SportsSLEUTH contests, ColdFusion on Linux is apparently called on to handle as many as 1.7 million page views per hour - a significant workload any way you look at it."
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