Have a look at these two news items in rapid succession:

Sun Acquires MySQL

Oracle Buys Sun

If you’re a MySQL user, you may join me in feeling a bit confused right now.

There are already whispers amongst the community of a suddenly increased interest in Ingres and PostgreSQL. There are suddenly storm clouds on the horizon for projects like GlassFish. The only thing that seems to be certain right now is that everyone is uncertain what will happen.

The upside of this (if there is one) is that this is a perfect time to go through your apps and make sure you’re using a Database Abstraction Layer. It’s a great time to think about any DB-specific functions (views, stored procedures, etc) that you’ve implemented and how they may be implemented elsewhere. Suddenly these sorts of tasks, which you’ve been putting off for years, have a new sense of urgency.

Hi everyone, my name is Jeff Parker and I developed the backend for the Aplus.net website. I thought I would share some thoughts and experiences as this may help those of you working to develop your own online presence.

Our goal was to develop a standards-compliant XHTML/CSS site that incorporates as many best practices as possible. This included testing compatibility with various browsers, implementing unobtrusive javascript (when possible) and ensuring we have friendly, descriptive URL’s. Like many of you, we had a very tight time schedule and wanted to deploy the most effective site we could in this timeframe.

Our work began by first building an affinity diagram of our old site to see exactly where we were at. We did this with two goals in mind:

1. Find how many clicks it takes to get to content
2. Discover extraneous pages

(more…)

To conclude our six-part primer on the basics of dedicated server operating systems (OS), we want to take a moment to cover some of the more popular alternatives to Linux® and Windows®. (more…)

Today we continue our beginner’s guide to dedicated server operating systems with a basic list of some key reasons why you may want to choose a Linux® OS for your dedicated server. (more…)

Linux is, for the most part, the industry standard dedicated server OS of choice. (more…)