[Fed-Talk] The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid according to InfoWorld
[Fed-Talk] The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid according to InfoWorld
- Subject: [Fed-Talk] The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid according to InfoWorld
- From: Dave Hale <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 22:59:38 -0500
A good list overall but here are 2 items of particular note for Apple:
<http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47FEtop20_3.html>
11. Developing Web apps for IE only
Despite the fact that mission-critical applications continue their
march onto the Web browser and that Windows continues to dominate the
corporate desktop, Web developers should avoid the temptation to
develop applications only for bug-ridden IE. IT shops that insist on
using IE for Web applications should be prepared to deal with malicious
code attacks such as JS.Scob.
First discovered in June 2004, JS.Scob was distributed via compromised
IIS Web servers. The code itself quietly redirects customers of
compromised sites to sites controlled by a Russian hacking group.
There, unwitting IE users download a Trojan horse program that captures
keystrokes and personal data. Although this might not sound like a
threat to corporate IT, keep in mind that employees often use the same
passwords across corporate and personal assets.
Many enterprises may not be able to avoid using IE. But if you make
sure your key Web applications don’t depend on IE-only functionality,
you’ll have an easier time switching to an alternative, such as Mozilla
Firefox, if ongoing IE security holes become too burdensome and risky
for your IT environment.
18. Underestimating PHP
IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and .Net when developing
scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at
scripting languages -- particularly PHP. This scripting language has
been around for a decade now, and millions of Yahoo pages are served by
PHP each day.
Discussion of PHP scalability reached a high-water mark in June, when
the popular social-networking site Friendster finally beat nagging
performance woes by migrating from J2EE to PHP. In a comment attached
to a Weblog post about Friendster’s switch to PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf,
inventor of PHP, explained the architectural secret of PHP’s capability
of scaling: “Scalability is gained by using a shared-nothing
architecture where you can scale horizontally infinitely.”
The stateless “shared-nothing” architecture of PHP means that each
request is handled independently of all others, and simple horizontal
scaling means adding more boxes. Any bottlenecks are limited to scaling
a back-end database. Languages such as PHP might not be the right
solution for everyone, but pre-emptively pushing scripting languages
aside when there are proven scalability successes is a mistake.
Dave Hale
Federal Systems Engineer, Apple Computer
email@hidden 888-257-2685 (voice/fax/mobile)
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