OSNews

Okay, so if we are just putting out opinions here, which is fine, here is mine.

When thinking about web servers it is significant to think about what the servers will be serving. There are static text files and images - no server platform will win large market based solely on the ability to serve static files. This is not a selling point. That leaves us with other key technologies, most notably: ASP.NET, JSP and PHP.

ASP.NET is both really great and yet also very disappointing. It is great from the point of view of an old style ASP developer who got tired of processing submitted forms the old way. But ASP.NET is still not that great, it does not overcome the inherit problem - web browsers are a very limited way to create a user interface. You shouldn't have to pull all your tricks out to make the interaction feel natural. You should have easy ability to show model dialogs. You should have powerful image processing controls built in. You should have highly specialized input validation done on the client side. Loading and saving data should be separate from loading the presentation structure.

ASP.NET and web browsers are a stop gap solution for MS. They will, when they have milked ASP.NET, reveal their master plan - which is to do Remote Avalon for UI w/ Indigo for data comm. Very little business logic would be in the app loaded on the client. The app would be served up from the web server and SOAP/Indigo would be handled by the web server.

The ASP.NET model of development is not extensible nor is planned to be the future. MS will either rope people into Remote Avalon or they will be stuck nursing ASP.NET to meet new features that it was never meant to.

JSP/JSF can be run on any platform, so the selling points will be on the cost to run the server. I'm not a Linux fan, but if I was a company and had to choose a web server platform I would choose Linux. The writing is on the wall, Linux is here and it is big. IBM, Novell, and many other players have made it clear.

PHP - not my thing but it is gaining steam, at least in my market area. I expect it is all over.

So I expect to see large growth in PHP and JSP/JSF. I expect to see med growth in ASP.NET. Since Remote Avalon is long off and will deployed on Intranets first, it doesn't count in this discussion.


WINDOWS

slowing growth and then evening out

THE MONO/DotGNU FACTOR

picking up some of the ASP.NET points, but not a big contender

THE BSDs

PHP and JSP/JSF - slowly lose market share (BSD is my fav, but I'm just saying what I see)

SOLARIS

10 may be great, but it doesn't really matter. The features of 10 are what you need on a 'mainframe'. IBM will not sleep through another big loss to Sun, IBM can beat Sun on every point, even price if they have to. solaris will drop massively in the next few years, sorry Sun

MAC OS X Server

very minor growth

LINUX

major growth, especially in international markets on small servers. also on IBM 'mainframes'

HP's OS's

dropping off