This is primarily addressing the issues that MacLir and BigJoe brought up. If you read the post that I originally referred to, you would see that I'm aware of the issues that have been raised here. No, I don't like this development environment. I want all platforms identical. Also, I know that I can have taint checking under IIS. Unfortunately, that involves switching to straight CGI instead of ISAPI (as mentioned in the previous post), and we sacrifice performance. Rather than do that, we stick with ISAPI.

Now, we *could* develop with CGI and IIS (instead of ISAPI and IIS), but then we have another problem: most of the idiots who used to be working here had no idea of how to develop Web sites. As a result, we have complete chaos that we are slowly reigning in. I've worked with the IS Director on this and with the company's limited resources, we've agreed that we will have one and only one development environment. Since some of our sites will run under Apache and some under IIS, we decided to pick the better of the two. The decision is actually a lot more involved than that, but this is the only way we felt we could get tight control. Later, as the development team is more disciplined,^* we'll hopefully be able to loosen the reigns and have a development environment which is more sane.

Do I like this compromise? No. Would I do it this way if I had a choice? No. Do I call all the shots? No. However, I don't know that it's a bad decision. By forcing a single development environment and rigorous standards on how we move things into staging and then into production (instead of "hey, I'll just make a quick hack on the production server"), we gain a measure of control that the previous management staff never had. Yes, it means that there are other things that we lose, but we're getting those things back and finally getting a handle on these issues.

Cheers,
Ovid

^*For example, one guy I sit next to has a Web site which calls two copies of his checkout.cgi script. These copies are identical, he just didn't bother to update all of his links. I was fixing some problems on his site last night and couldn't figure out why my bug fixes weren't showing up. It really is a nightmare around here, but it's getting better.

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