MySpace, Cold Fusion and Asp .Net

I didn't realise Myspace has actually been in .Net for 9 months. I had assumed that its suckiness would go once they dropped CF 5.

From a user point of view, it's WORSE. More outages, more broken pages, more ugly fugly pages. And today it seems to be down altogether, 9 months after they moved to ASP .Net

I've been doing a little research, here's some excerpts from some forums. I will see if i can find any more recent comments. I realise these need to be read in context, but it's these ones that particularly interested me.


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Comment from April last year

Myspace is not Cold Fusion anymore. The have rebuilt it on ASP .NET v2 with the help of BlueDragon to maintain integrity to the old Cold Fusion Fusebox links. It looks like CF on the surface, but it is now 100% ASP .NET v2

Comment from March last year

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Hi everyone,

I work on the MySpace C# codebase...

To clarify, we wrote a custom configuration section that maps "fuseaction" URL parameters to ASPX extensions so that we'd maintain link integrity. The only place we aren't doing this is 'Browse' and certain other new features. Meanwhile, as Scott said the parts of the site that are running in ColdFusion are essentially doing so in ASP.NET 2.0 (via BlueDragon).

Thanks for the mention, Scott. It's been an exciting time putting this together and I can't imagine pulling this off on another platform.

Chris

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Comment from June last year

Thats right, MySpace made the mistake of moving to .NET, and now it's researching the next move since .NET has global reliability problems. MySpace is looking at Tomcat - Java - Hibernate - Wicket as a serious contender! Praise Java!


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from http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/03/25/Handling-1.5-Billion-Page-Views-Per-Day-Using-ASP.NET-2.0.aspx
and http://blogs.business2.com/business2blog/2006/03/how_myspace_bea.html

Basically, MySpace needs a complete rewrite of the codebase from the ground up. If they haven't done that in .Net, then either

a) the decisionmakers are clowns and are listening to bad advice
b) .Net really doesn't cut it at that level (unlikely, given other big sites are written in it)
c) their developers and technical architects are crap.

It doesn't really matter so much which backend technology they use, they will all do the job one way or another. But they can't keep limping along trying to patch things.

I'd like to add that from a coder's point of view (having used .Net and learning PHP):

Cold Fusion 7 rocks.

Cold Fusion 5 was good, but not object-oriented. CF 7 is amazingly fast to code in, fully supports OO coding techniques and n-tier frameworks and seems to perform well at an enterprise level, so far. You can even get down and dirty and hack/code the Java engine which it's now based on. Can't wait to see what extra goodies Adobe pack into version 8. I am guessing there will be even more integration with Flash and Ajax technologies - which are already pretty darn cool in 7.


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