Microsoft Launches Free Web Software Eco-System

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes."

Re:Not needed for server apps

[Darkness404]

Running a server requires some technical knowhow. The more you attempt to "dumb it down" the higher chances you have with someone who really doesn't know what they are doing to admin a server. This is a bad thing for a few reasons, A) A GUI or any other "helper" program makes your server more insecure, a simple command line install running only Apache and a firewall is going to have less security holes by default then the person running Apache, a Firewall all under X and KDE. B) It is very, very, very, easy to socially engineer GUI attacks. On the other hand, its a lot harder on a command line because most of the documentation is standardized. C) If you don't even know what you are doing, how are you securing your box? If someone can't understand a command line, how are they possibly going to understand the complexities in making a server reasonably secure?

The overworked IT guy should know how to run a server using the command line if one of his principle duties is running a server. A command line is no slower than a GUI (its faster in most cases) to someone who knows how to use it. If you hire someone to run a server, they better know what they are doing.

Re:Microsoft and what?

[Firehed]

I'm inclined to think that they want to put IIS (and ASP.NET) in front of as many casual Windows-based web developers as possible. Of course with both WAMP and XAMPP taking about three minutes to install I'm not sure that will work - especially since a number of PHP web apps require some odd hacks to get them to work under IIS.

In order to be "deployable" under these settings, new developers will have to use the same hacks and/or workarounds, and could well forget to address how the standard behavior will act on *AMP servers, theoretically creating a bunch of new PHP web apps that will only deploy properly on PHP/IIS servers.

Of course, the number of hosts that are offering PHP/IIS rather than *AMP is absolutely miniscule, so these apps catching on (if this is the case) is slim to none.

Part of me thinks that it's more a ploy to get .NET in front of PHP developers, trying to sell them on the "look at all of this premade, drag-and-drop functionality" thing, but I doubt that will make a difference. Devs that need what .NET offers are going to already be using IIS setups and PHP devs will probably ignore it due to the relatively steep learning curve (or just being forced to work in Visual Studio unless you want to memorize an entire framework).

So... I have no idea. If my cynicism is correct, then I see what they're trying to do but don't see it working that well. If not, then your guess is as good as mine.

Re:Microsoft and what?

[gbjbaanb]

Of course with both WAMP and XAMPP taking about three minutes to install I'm not sure that will work

Ah but it will, Microsoft developers don't tend to look outside the box to see if there's anything else out there - they generally assume that MS provides all they would ever need, and if MS doesn't provide it, its either not available at all, or they never needed it anyway.

This is why this will succeed, the MS blogs and communities will pick up on it and suddenly they'll think its the best thing ever. I doubt they'll actually use much PHP, that's just the teaser to pre-populate the site with apps, they'll all get taken over with ASP.NET MVC stuff before too long -the MS crowd just don't like to install 'foreign' stuff like PHP when they will think nothing of installing over a gig of .net framework to start playing with C#.

So - I don't know if it'll work well either.

PackageKit and free web software.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already open source projects for this kind of functionality.

PackageKit [wikipedia.org] already have a basic start [gnome.org] for something like this.

The web frontend for PackageKit can be further developed. The web software developers should be encouraged to develop simple web based configuration for their applications.

Easy to configure web based applications with PackageKit based package management have a lot of positive aspects.
PackageKit - Main Page [packagekit.org]
PackageKit - Screenshots [packagekit.org]

Installing public web pages from tarballs has always been a major potential security problem. It makes total sense to use the distros packages and security maintenance for web applications.