On 7/03/2003 11:18 AM, "George Allaman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've designed a fairly complex app in Turbine just to get to know it. > MySQL connectivity, lots of forms and actions, sort of a classmates.com > clone for a small private school I went to. The best way to learn something is to do it. > > It works fine in the TDK, although it took me about 5X longer to > implement it than I thought it would. Some of that was due to my own > poor ability to project plan, but a lot was due to the unexpected > difficulty of troubleshooting. The documentation is very incomplete - > understandably, since this is a volunteer project. When things didn't > work the way I expected it took hours and days to tease the solution out > of the mail list archives and the unstructured documentation. Documentation patches and wiki contributions are very welcome. If everyone provided documentation for the problems they have encountered and worked through, the documentation would gradually improve. > > I think I've just stumbled across another major reason NOT to use > Turbine. My application, which uses lots of Velocity templates rather > than JSPs, is not at all portable to other servlet containers. Naively, > I installed Tomcat without Turbine on my "production" machine (an old PC > in my home but it hosts my Apache HTTP web server) thinking I could > deploy the app there. Imagine my "well, duh!" when I realized that > Velocity is needed to parse and translate my templates. Um, why not just install the appropriate velocity jar file along with your application? I deploy to Jetty with no problems and I am 99.999% sure that others have no problems deploying to other servlet containers. > > It occurs to me that an app developed in Turbine using Velocity > templates is not portable to any other application server. If I had used > JSPs instead, I could port it to any app server that has a compliant > servlet container. Considering that very few ISPs support full blown > Apache HTTP server - Turbine - Tomcat - Velocity platforms, this seems > like a pretty big limitation. Trust me, it works. > > Yes, I can develop JSP or stricly servlet applications in Turbine, but > without Velocity what's the point? Why not just use Tomcat alone? The > documentation is much better, the infrastructure is simpler, and the > connection to Apache HTTP web server is fairly straightforward. If your application is anything more than trivial you should find that Velocity is only a part of what you get from turbine, albeit a really useful part. > > One argument for using Turbine might be that, for large-ish scale > development where you have graphic designers doing the page layout, the > Velocity syntax is a hell of a lot easier for them to understand than > Java syntax in JSPs. I don't consider this much on an argument. Writing > the Velocity code presumes a good understanding of the context objects > it references, so I think the Java programmers have to do a lot of this > anyway. See the velocity site for a larger discussion of the arguments. > > Another might be the rich facility Turbine offers for navigations and > layouts. Can't this be handled pretty easily with a similar directory > structure and conditional JSP include directives? Re-implement your application this way and see just how easy it is. I would suggest that you will quickly begin to miss the features offered by turbine. > > I'm probably missing important points, but I think this is a good thread > to start. People just getting started with Turbine need to know what it > CAN'T do as well as what it can do. I am not saying that turbine is flawless, but I don't think you have provided details of anything that turbine can't do. Hopefully after you will work out how to get velocity across to your other server (should take only a few minutes) you will realise that all is well and good. Cheers, Scott -- Scott Eade Backstage Technologies Pty. Ltd. http://www.backstagetech.com.au .Mac Chat/AIM: seade at mac dot com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
