I'm just a humble Struts user (and relatively new), and I don't claim to speak
for the
group as a whole.
I have read through Donald Brown's presentation (Struts 1.3 and beyond) and I
get the
feeling that the goal posts just don't stop moving.
The time I have spent learning and creating a Struts application should be an
investment in my future development, not a stepping stone to a whole new set of
technologies that will continue to slow my productivity (through on-going
training).
Who, and this is my question, who makes the decision whether a technology is
going to
be good for the greater community? Who asks the questions "Do we need it?",
"Will
the technology provide significantly greater returns than training costs?",
"Will the
technology last long enough to deliver those returns?"
Who is it that has decided we need to keep extending the Struts framework
without
considering the developers' need for better problem identification and
documentation of
the existing Struts system. This list gets so many emails of people struggling
with
existing technology: Dynaforms, Validation, Iteration, Cookies, Flow control,
and the
number of different versions of everything "out there" that we need to know
about in
order to work with this system.
Who answers the question, "Why aren't we getting better error checking /
debugging
facilities for Struts?"
It would be amiss of me to say Struts alone is responsible here, we should
include
Tomcat, MySQL, Connector/J, JSP, Java. And I'm not saying everybody is doing a
terrible job, just asking whether we need to refocus our development efforts.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft but at least they have somebody that makes those
decisions
and they appear to be developing their technology for productivity. They have
documentation. They have tutorials. They have backward compatibility. And,
have
you noticed how many websites are using .NET technology! The number seems to
growing much faster than J2EE or JEE.
When I was looking for an ISP to host my Struts application I found many more
companies providing Microsoft servers with .NET than Unix/Linux servers with
the
necessary version of Tomcat or JBoss.
If I were to write a web product to be sold and run inhouse, I would probably
develop it
using Microsoft technology, it's just so much easier to say, "requires IIS 6+
and
SQLserver 2005+" and know that it will work. If you had to ship your product
how many
technologies with specific versions would you have to list?
Is Struts in danger of becoming just an academic exercise? If Struts is going
to be
productive then we need to see:
* more documentation (and I'm not talking about the API, I'm sick of trying
to read the
API and guess the usage of the taglib functions) plus tutorials, online
training etc,
* more tools for building our applications (I know there are some but I'm on
NetBeans
and it appears to be lagging behind, Eclipse and Exadel I found to be too
inflexible),
* more error checking of the configuration files and better error messages
indicating
what the real problem is, maybe even warnings before the program runs,
* more debugging utilities (spying on the http conversations and being able
to
examine the contents of our beans),
* more backward compatibility so that I don't have to spend hours upgrading
my app
when my server updates or I move to a new server,
* more stability in the platform we choose (with reference to the recent
Tomcat bugs
that were brought to the attention of this list).
If I were asked to vote it would probably be a conservative vote to consolidate
our
current technologies with better tools and a better product.
Okay, there, I said it. It's out of my system and open for discussion.
Kind regards
mc
On 9 Sep 2005 at 19:39, Don Brown wrote:
> Heh, well, I can assure you I for one have my doubts :) Shale is one of the
> more interesting developments in Struts and certainly deserved a few slides.
> My goal was not to promote Shale as the future, but provide a snapshot of
> the many growth areas within Struts, Shale included. I wanted to say more
> about a new development I'm personally more interested in, Struts Ti, but it
> isn't to the level of maturity and acceptance as Shale so it was relegated
> to a single bullet.
>
> Don
>
> On 9/9/05, $BNB_[>l (B <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > Don
> >
> > I have read your presentation.
> > I give me an impression.
> >
> > Shale is the future of Struts without doubt!!!
> >
> >
> >
> > 2005/9/8, Don Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > > I just finished giving a presentation titled "Struts 1.3 and Beyond" to
> > the
> > > Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG that I thought folks on this list might
> > be
> > > interested in. In addition to the regular slide keyboard controls, press
> > "T"
> > > to toggle the outline/printable view which contains extra notes.
> > >
> > > Presentation: http://www.twdata.org/presentations/struts-future/
> > > Presentation software: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
> > >
> > > Don
> > >
> > >
> >
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> >
>
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