Which is better, JSP or PHP? that's a religious questions, depends on whether you believe in god or not? but who is god anyway?The question itself isn't a very good one. It should be which is better J2EE or PHP because it's not really possible to look at JSP in isolation. There is no doubt that PHP is the better langauge for building web apps. PHP is the shortest path between the problem and the solution. J2EE will take you through a more scenic path. It might possibly be argued that the road built with J2EE technology will be more durable and can carry vehicles with bigger loads, but that is another religious question.If you are a java programmer you will say PHP code looks really messy when you embed it into HTML and PHP programmers will come back and say JSP looks a lot worse, which is true. The retort generally given is that you can make use of varius tag libs such as struts or jstl to make the code neater. Some people will also make vague references to the MVC pattern.If these advocates of tag libraries look at the servlet source code generated from their JSP they will surely bring up their dinner. Hand coded JSP when made into a servlet might make you lose your appetite but your dinner will hopefully stay in.Not so with PHP, once you have written a few hundred thousand lines of code with PHP you can make scripts that look distinctily sexy.

Religion: JSP vs PHP

Today I was surprised to discover that my default installation of vpopmail stores passwords in plain text. I had been using this setup without much thought for some time, but today I was curious and decided to take a look at the vpasswd file while playing around with a .qmail file. I was expecting the format to be similar to the /etc/passwd file, where passwords are hashed in a one-way function, making them unreadable even to the superuser. However, I found that in the case of vpasswd, the password is stored in plain text in the last column.I now need to explore better ways of securely storing passwords to protect user privacy.

vpopmail shocker

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 Looking for the ideal hosting company? then AIT.com is one to avoid. Recently we needed some low cost hosting options, primarily as bakups for the servers we have at <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/">Webquarry</a>. We made a colossal mistake of choosing AIT.
 They took 5 days to set up the machine, when the did, they sent the root password in a plain text email message! And when I logged in, to find that the hard disk in it's entirity had been made into a single partition I immidiately knew that we had made a bad choice.
 Then yesterday the worst happened. They actually assigned the IP that was allocated to our server (216.117.163.79) to another machine. This is surely as idiotic as you can get, it would seem that people who have never used the ping command are in charge of system administration at AIT.com
 Now one might expect that immidiately after contacting them and informing them of the issue they might resolve it. They did not. They sent me a mail that says:
 
 <quote>In reviewing this issue, please provide us with more information pertaining to this issue, like what strange activities you have noticed about your server, and we will look into this issue further.</quote>
 
 Those idiots don't even know what an IP conflict is. They have taken every effort to make sure that contacting them for support is as difficult as could be. As with most US companies they have a stupid support ticket system with one way email only, the difference from other organizations is that they have hidden the historically records very cleverly.)
 So as a last resort I have got on the phone to them. So far in three attempts the only response I have receieved was something to the effect "All our customer support staff are handling other customers please access our website". And as already mentioned there's precious little support available through the website.
 Though they have a toll free number, I am calling from outside the US, as a result each call has cost a few dollars. I wouldn't mind if I didn't have to put up with a 30 second recording that is automatically played when ever the number is dialled. It just says since I am calling from outside the US i will be charged standard IDD rates. So i have to pay extra to listen to that stupid message.
 So the bottom line is that the server has been inaccessible for over2 hours now. If you are looking for a hosting company that can give you an appalling service, do everything in their power to make sure that your server stays down, this is the company to choose.
 Footnote:
 Follow up post added on <a href="410.html">June 21</a>
 
 

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Monthly Archives for 2004 06

Religion: JSP vs PHP

vpopmail shocker

Hosting Company to avoid