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Burz

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Monday, July 11th 2005, 8:40am

MS uses KDE + Apache as 'lack of integration' example?

eWeek has an article about a Microsoft sponsored hands-on lab where KDE and Apache are featured:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1835516,00.asp

I think its kind of sad if KDE was used to argue that Linux has a "steep learning curve". Would this kind of be avoided if KDE had a configuration Kpart for Apache in the control center? What if Apache supplied such a thing, or met KDE half-way by providing an API?

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Monday, July 11th 2005, 11:09am

RE: MS uses KDE + Apache as 'lack of integration' example?

Hmmm... the "steep learning curve"

That's not really a great way to compare things.

First of all, anyone new to any operating system (including windows) will be faced with a learning curve. And for most users, it's pretty steep as they will need to grasp whole new ideas that are not really common to them.

Second, people already familiar with any operating system will find it much more easy to switch to another operating system. It takes a while to get comfortable though.

Third, "steep" depends from person to person. Some people learn faster than others, so the "steep learning curve" is a very general comment.



As for the integration of KDE and Apache.
Why would this be a problem on Linux and not on Windows?

A person setting up a webserver and doesn't know how to use a command line should not even think about setting up a webserver. (Well, that's my opinion of course).
This does not mean that a GUI configuration tool is not nice to have of course.

This GUI config tool should be written by the people who wrote that software, or a 3rd party, not KDE. I don't think it's possible for the KDE developers to maintain a configuration panel for every software that's around.

What KDE can do is provide a nice API to write such a configuration window/program/applet/... in a very short time. And hope/ask those other projects to make use of it, or wait for a 3rd party to maintain such a thing.


In other words:
in my opinion, having a gui config for something doesn't mean it's integrated well or not. Integration, to me, means that different programs know how to communicate with eachother. And as far as I know, hundreds if not thousands of programs on linux know how to communicate with a webserver like Apache :)

ps: Isn't it possible to configure Apache via a webbrowser (webpage) somehow? I never used Appache, so I don't know.

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "tbscope" (Jul 11th 2005, 11:12am)


anda_skoa

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Monday, July 11th 2005, 2:31pm

RE: MS uses KDE + Apache as 'lack of integration' example?

Quoted

Originally posted by tbscope
As for the integration of KDE and Apache.
Why would this be a problem on Linux and not on Windows?


I agree.
Windows definitely doesn't have a GUI for every possible service it can run.

And the steep lurning curve wasn't related to the KDE desktop inthe lab's setup, but to the idea that using the commandline required more learning effort than using GUI tools.

Given the respective GUI tools it would be comparable.

I think if the only problems the lab setup had were configuring system level resources throught KDE GUIs, then this is a very positive review of KDE as it means that none or only few of the KDE related things were worth mentioning as differences.

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Burz

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Friday, July 15th 2005, 12:57am

RE: MS uses KDE + Apache as 'lack of integration' example?

Quoted

Originally posted by anda_skoa

Quoted

Originally posted by tbscope
As for the integration of KDE and Apache.
Why would this be a problem on Linux and not on Windows?


I agree.
Windows definitely doesn't have a GUI for every possible service it can run.

_


I think MS is showing that Apache cares flop-all for GUI users, and expected the attendee to contrast this in their mind with IIS. Very many developers and sysadmins would not want to be forced into using the CLI, esp. when they are often molding and re-molding spare desktops into development test systems and ad-hoc servers for their teams' development tools.

Yes, I am thinking about the Visual Studio audience. These people demand GUI discoverability, even if many of them like to tweak their most crucial components in the CLI once they feel familiar with them.

?( FWIW, the demonstration was a bit dishonest in that it ignored webmin and specific Linux distros which supply GUI-based config tools. But they did stress their belief that moving between distros is difficult (probably for this reason).

I think people in KDE and (*cough*) Gnome could put pressure on Apache and others to provide APIs to manage the configuration of these subsystems.

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Friday, July 15th 2005, 9:54am

RE: MS uses KDE + Apache as 'lack of integration' example?

Quoted

Originally posted by Burz
?( FWIW, the demonstration was a bit dishonest in that it ignored webmin and specific Linux distros which supply GUI-based config tools. But they did stress their belief that moving between distros is difficult (probably for this reason).

I think people in KDE and (*cough*) Gnome could put pressure on Apache and others to provide APIs to manage the configuration of these subsystems.
I think webmin is better than a configuration program in KDE. If you have a configuration module, users might think that X is needed to run an apache server, or users might install X because of the configuration module. AFAIK, for servers with only apache, it is better to not install an X server (X contains many lines of code => X contains (many) bugs => more chance to have a critical bug).

Webmin does work on a server with X (in - for example - Konqueror) and on a server without X (another computer in the network, or a text-based browser), so it leaves all options open.

Burz

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Saturday, July 16th 2005, 3:07am

RE: MS uses KDE + Apache as 'lack of integration' example?

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Originally posted by mart_k
I think webmin is better than a configuration program in KDE. If you have a configuration module, users might think that X is needed to run an apache server, or users might install X because of the configuration module. AFAIK, for servers with only apache, it is better to not install an X server (X contains many lines of code => X contains (many) bugs => more chance to have a critical bug).

Webmin does work on a server with X (in - for example - Konqueror) and on a server without X (another computer in the network, or a text-based browser), so it leaves all options open.


That is your opinion, which may be right in and of itself. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of integration with services.

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Sunday, July 17th 2005, 6:15pm

RE: MS uses KDE + Apache as 'lack of integration' example?

Quoted

Originally posted by Burz
I think MS is showing that Apache cares flop-all for GUI users

Yes, very likely. Apache is a web server which usually doensn't run on machines GUI libraries installed, actually often they don't even have graphics cards.

But I guess any company doing Apache based products could offer administration GUIs, just like other service providers to for their services.
Very likely they already do.

Quoted


I think people in KDE and (*cough*) Gnome could put pressure on Apache and others to provide APIs to manage the configuration of these subsystems.


I don't think Apache could be pressured to do this by anyone, maybe persuaded by sheer user demand, but definitely not by unrelated projects.

And while an API would probably be nice, an application for a single service, i.e. a fixed number of configuration files/options could be written with just the knowledge about those files.

Anyway. My original point still stands that the lack of a Apache service GUI is not something that makes KDE look bad, as I doubt Windows has one even for IIS without installing it along IIS and that is a product of the same company.

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