Java, Perl, etc.

Chuck Williams chuckwilliams1 at home.com
Thu Sep 27 04:47:10 CDT 2001


Justin,

Good review of current technologies. Well considering I'm not active in them.
Especially appreciated the line between JSP and Java. It's kinda what I was
afraid of. I went to a seminar a few nights ago on .Net and was told MS did a
great job of ripping Java and JSP off (really, that's what they said:
http://www.westlake.com). So thanks for the warning 'cuz there's people
walking around here singing about Java Servlet Pages. Seriously though I'm
more interested in Java now that the folks on this list pitched in. I suspect
our IT is heading  towards XML. I know there's a lot of PDF activity here too.

PHP? Yeah as if they consult me before making every move! Hah. I don't have a
clue what technologies they do and don't look at. In my mind I imagine though
they wonder "what does Chuck think about ...". I've been to (too many) web
sales marketing meetings here until I realized the execs are clueless and my
time is better spent learning and exploring all the tools I currently have
like Perl, Oracle, Unix.

Just for the record our web group has never touched the company intranet. So
when IT (who's new to the party) volunteered to work on it to practice their
skills we just kinda laughed inside.

-- Chuck Williams
====================================

Justin Buist wrote:

> Long time lurker here... though I'd pipe up on the subject though.  Some
> perl mongers I met at a Sun security summit at Calvin a while back got me
> interested in the group.  Regretfully I never took the time to come to a
> meeting of any sort but I've enjoyed the lively discussion on the list
> lately.  Anyway... back to the point.
>
> > Our web group was in the Publications Division until this summer and we
> > chose our own course. So it was Perl and Oracle. We work primarily in
> > the vi editor in Unix so there's your culture.
>
> How archaic...  you should have dumped vi for vim a long time ago. :)
>
> > happens. But I do know that a business with so much invested in graphic
> > talent is pretty harsh when web sites aren't both graphically and
> > functionally appealing.
>
> As others have said what it comes down to is what kind of tasks must your
> intranet perform?  As we all know some things are more cumbersome in Perl
> which would be easier in Java and vice versa.  There's more than one way
> to do a website in Java too.  I'll iterate through the stuff I've played
> with and know about.
>
> ColdFusion:
> Great if you can't actually program and your website is nothing more than
> DB queries.  It better be small too -- managing these CFML templates is a
> bear once they become over a couple of hundred lines.  Functions don't
> actually exist in this language so what I'd do it a single file in any
> other language, if broken out into "tags", becomes 10-20 files.
> Horrid.
>
> Perl:
> Nevermind, you all know the pros/cons to this one.
>
> PHP:
> Syntax reminds me of Perl; easy to learn... fairly well documented; good
> user community around it too.  I like it; we converted a CF project to PHP
> recently and did it blindingly fast.  Much faster than the oringal CF
> development by about 1/4th.  Part of that was because the team changed
> slightly by bringing out fastest ASP/VBScript guy onto the project and
> making him learn PHP.  I like the way PHP works with Apache too, seems
> like a much more stable and faster application server than CF.
>
> ASP/VBScript:
> Same category as PHP for me, though I'm not very well versed in it.  I
> just don't like the way the language acts and it looks too much like VBA
> while still being different.  Huge source of confusion for me but I'm
> neither a good VBScript nor VBA programmer.
>
> Java Servlets:
> Nice model for "heavy lifting" sites.  You can pull in all sorts of XML
> tools to get the job done and build nice packagable products out of it.
> We're in the final stages of a project which was both Servlets and a Java
> Application which shared common objects between the two of them.  Our
> database -> PDF publication framework was originally going to be web based
> using FOP (http://xml.apache.org/fop) but it was pulled over to the client
> side application with little work.
>
> Java JSP:
> Inherits the ugly nature of a tag based framework like CF.  I just don't
> agree with using a language as powerful as Java and intermingly it so
> absurdly with the presentation layer.  It tries to abstract the two layers
> apart but I've seen (and heard) that it's easy for programmers to just do
> the wrong thing here.
>
> I just have to ask though, why isn't PHP on the table here?
>
> Justin Buist
> Trident Technology, Inc.
> 4700 60th St. SW, Suite 102
> Grand Rapids, MI  49512
> Ph. 616.554.2700
> Fx. 616.554.3331
> Mo. 616.291.2612




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