* Nathan Torkington ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [001212 22:09]:
> I think the 100% Java idea has had its day. Microsoft's .NET is a
> tacit admission that in the real world Microsoft will never own 100%
> of the market, so let's make things work better together.
>
> In that vein, I'd love to see an article on mod_perl and JSP
> cooperating. That is, a website that uses both and admits that each
> has its place. I know a lot of people don't like Java (I'm one of
> them), but mentioning JSP is the foot in the door to getting mindshare
> back from those folks who now think that Java is the only way.
>
> Anyone run such an installation? Anyone want to write about their
> setup and experiences?
>
> Nat
Kind of off-topic but not really: I've recently moved from a job with
100% Perl to one with 80% Java / 20% Perl. One of the things I miss
most is the Template Toolkit. (There are lots of other things too, but
this keeps coming up again and again.) TT is just so amazingly useful
and simple enough that I can't believe more people aren't using it.
As for Java, I find it really hard to believe that JSP has caught on
like it has. The syntax is *amazingly* clunky and leads me to believe
that most people who write JSP use WYSIWYG editors to generate the
code for them. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it gets
my hackles up that catering to one group of folks raises the barriers
for another.)
"Clunky syntax" might seem like a trivial concern, but IMO it's
not. It goes right to the heart of usability -- JSP does not make easy
things easy. Since you can embed Java into the page, hard things are
possible, but the wisdom of doing a lot of processing in the page
itself is beyond me.
(And generating web-interfaces from servlets is sufficiently painful
that we don't need to discuss it -- haven't any of these smart Java
people ever heard of heredocs?)
In fact, entirely separate frameworks -- from the open source world
there's WebMacro (www.webmacro.org) and the WebMacro spin-off Velocity
project (jakarta.apache.org/velocity/), among others -- have sprung up
to address JSP's deficiencies.
But JSP has hooks in various editors (notably Dreamweaver) and has big
money (Sun, Oracle, IBM...) behind it. Plus it has a published
standard and (despite its syntax) is quite extensible.
Chris
--
Chris Winters ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.
