[geeks] You Are in a Maze of Twisty Tunnels...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, Dave McGuire wrote:

>    I can't answer your specific question, as I've only started playing
> with J2EE stuff recently...but I was faced with a similar job several
> months ago, and I decided on servlets.

And I can deploy those with just Apache + Tomcat?

> They're simple, there are good tutorials out there (I can point you to
> the one that helped me), and it's quick and easy to get up to speed.

Sounds good.

> JSP has really nice capabilities, but like any scripting-embedded-in-
> HTML trick, it's ugly as sin and very difficult to read.

That's the problem with web-based applications (IMHO).  It's difficult
to design an elegant way to produce many autogenerate documents when the
document design and logic are so intertwined.  Until someone finds a
good way to abstract over HTML, everything from CGI to PHP to whatever
will be fugly because you're hopping between your implementation
language and your presentation language in the same bundle of code.
Every other GUI design system in use (including Win32 and Motif) allow
standardized ways to decouple the UI design from the logic
implementation, providing simplified special-purpose languages for the
former.

> The majority of the J2EE stuff seems like it's way, way more than you
> need for a library management system.

Right, and the tutorials on java.sun.com make it sound like an
all-or-nothing deal.  I'm glad that's not the case.

>    I wrote a very simple database front-end servlet that I can send you
> that'll get you started, if you're like me and learn more quickly from
> functional code than from volumes of documentation.

No, I'm pretty sure that once I know what direction to take, I can
figure it out.  It's just that J2EE is so much to take in at once and
sift out the superfluous.  I'll take a look at servlets for now.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
  "Albert Einstein nailed space-time, but the wild thing had him stumped.
   Al, baby, two and two make five-and-a-quarter; that's why people fall
   in love." -- Thomas Dolby, "That's Why People Fall in Love"