Did you ever have to choose between WISA or LAMP at the beginning of a web project?
While pros and cons are littered around the net, it would be helpful to know about your real experience in coming up w/ criteria, evaluating, deciding, and reflecting upon your decision to go w/ either platform.
@Thomas WISA is:
W=Windows
I=IIS
S=SQL (Microsoft SQL Server)
A=ASP (or ASP .NET)
As for choosing between them, I would think that the available resources and talent would be the deciding factor. If you can get great ASP .NET and MS SQL devs, go that route. If you've got a bunch of PHP/MySQL gurus on hand, go LAMP.
The reality is, regardless of the pros and cons of the platform, you'll struggle to get a great system on WISA out of a primarily PHP dev team, and vice versa.
I think the first part is your Application. If you decide to go PHP, you almost automatically end up with LAMP, as WIMP or WISP stacks are quite rare (I think blog.stackoverflow.com runs on WIMP), and with .net you definitely want to go WISA.
So normally, it boils down to .net vs. PHP. (Ignoring Ruby, Python and all the other stuff for a moment). When you made that decision, the rest comes naturally or adapts into your environment (i.e. if all your admins in the company are windows admins, maybe WAMP works better for you)
I switched from PHP to .net about a year ago and I never looked back at PHP, but I never had to look at the bill for Windows and SQL Server licenses to be fair. Deployment on WISA has a much higher initial cost due to the licenses involved, whereas a LAMP Stack is free (Yes, MySQL is also free for commercial use).
Addendum:
All the funny acronyms stand for the combination of technologies: (L)inux or (W)indows, (A)pache or (I)IS, (M)ySQL or (S)QL Server, (P)hp or (A)SP.net.
Cost is our biggest thing pushing us towards the LAMP environment, no question about it. Trying to go through Corporate procurement for Windows and SQL server licenses is horrific.
WISA can be cheap, if your application doesn't need anything beyond shared hosting, there is little cost.
It can also be expensive, then again so can LAMP once you get to the same size.
Personally, I like the WISA stack, but its more out of familiarity than anything.
Two things that stand out:
There is no need to be religious about one or the other. Do what fits your needs best, and do what you prefer to work in.
Something that people don't tend to figure in his the time savings in Developer Hours between platforms.
Take for example, a WISA app vrs a LAMP app, The initial cost of the enviroment may be a $2000 difference, but that is made up in just 20 developer hours.
So, if by using .NET, you are able to trim 20 hours from development or maintenance of the project you have already made up the difference.
There is never more apparent than when you need to scale the platform out and you suddenly realize you need to sink mountains of developer time into making a scripting language as fast as a compiled one.
This is basically ASP.NET vs PHP.. If you (or the developers) have lots of experience with PHP, you use LAMP, or if they have used ASP.NET a lot, you chose WISA..
That said, while not strictly LAMP, Apache/MySQL/PHP will run on pretty much any platform you can name, which I would consider a big plus.
There is never more apparent than when you need to scale the platform out and you suddenly realize you need to sink mountains of developer time into making a scripting language as fast as a compiled one.
Arguing the benefits of a compiled language for web-applications is a bit silly, really. The language itself shouldn't ever limit the application, if it's designed sensibly.. Many big sites are coded in PHP for example. Again, that said, if the developers are familiar with ASP.Net, they are going to code better in that, so it will scale better.. Same with PHP.
Basically, choose a reasonable language that the developer(s) know, and then the appropriate server...
I personally use both stacks and the reason really depends on the client. If a client can support LAMP, it is certainly cheaper but it is important what the client or company can support.
As an independent developer I would not recommend LAMP when all of the client's assets exist on Windows. It is really a comfort level as either platform works equally well to solve any problem.
I've used PHP/MySQL for a while, and I've used Rails, and I'm getting into ASP.NET right now.
My incentive for switching to ASP.NET at the moment is similar to my incentive for digging into Rails--I find C# and Ruby to be much more enjoyable languages to code in. The object models are much more mature, and it feels like I'm fighting with the tool a lot less.
I can't really compare MySQL to SQL Server yet, because I haven't done too much with the latter yet.
My decision was based on two things. First and foremost I hated programming in ASP. I did it for an old job, and when given a choice I would choose PHP. I also tend to enjoy Linux over Windows.
When it came to actually picking though, the corporate heads chose LAMP due to cost. Because let's be honest as developers, language isn't that big of deal. One thing I didn't get into, but apparently MySQL isn't exactly free in business situations. I don't know the details, but you should look into it before getting sued.
FYI
MySQL $599/year/server for basic up to $4999/year/server for everything
MsSQL $212/processor/month for server web apps.
If you have a dual processor machine that's just over $5k for either MySQL or MsSQL, however, if you have more that two processors or only need MySQL basic the cost is cheaper than MS.
Pricing as of July 2010
That is true MySQL is $599 (one license is required per database server) for commercial use
I think the team is the biggest issue. WISA isn't universally worse or better than LAMP for any particular job. My expertize is in LAMP. I have very little experience with WISA, so I would never pick it.
It's more along the lines of photography -- if all your lenses were Canon's, why would you buy a Nikon body for a big gig?
