Rant! Been stewing over this for a couple of months. Having worked with, but mostly following the J beta, I feel like I have walked out of the garden and into the jungle. As I attempt to handle the various aspects of the beta I keep getting drug into side issues which take considerable time to learn properly. At the start of the beta I looked at the scripts, which at that time, were still reasonably short. I dug out what and how the J engine interfaced to this new world. Clean and elegant. Simple once understood, though I pondered over it for days. Like the rest of J.
Then came SVN. Probably nice once one gets the hang of it. I haven't yet. Now JavaScript. JavaScript itself is pretty straightforward, but to use it one needs to know HTML. Then CSS to more easily provide platform independence. Then XML and AJAX. That's for the JFE side. Here comes GTK as well. Learning each of these tools is a major undertaking. Never mind that documentation for these packages refer to ASP and JAVA for the server side. How to relate that to J is not clear to me yet. But that is what the beta is all about. It is a work in progress. Non-J apps using these tools seem to be mostly glitz and show, but contain little meat. Simple ideas requiring little code to implement, but huge amounts of code to present results to the user. What I am concerned about is what the end product may look like. One major thing that attracted me to J was that I could use it quite nicely without getting into the nitty-gritty issues of the computer and operating system I use. The wd interface, though restrictive, was portable and not hard to learn. I hope that the released J7 can retain some of this ability for one to concentrate on the problem at hand and not require large amounts of time and resources getting the presentation to the user right. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
