Game over. We lost. Nothing to see here, move along.

[Ben Evans]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 01:19:11PM +0000, Nigel Rantor wrote:
> Ben Evans wrote:
> > In short - nothing that wasn't already part of the dev experience in 2001-2.
> > 
> > The caveats are pretty obvious: Sybase is nasty, Catalyst is not Maypole, etc.
> > 
> > But I'm getting pretty close to just jacking it all in and recommending JSP
> > for all future web development. The learning curve will be steeper to begin
> > with, but in the end, there are more resources, more support and the key 
> > risk to projects I'm on will be much less.

I should have said "all future web development _at work_" btw. Oops.
I'm not going to do JSP web dev in my spare time.
 
> *back-ported thought* This is turning into a bit of a rant, oops...
> 
> JSP isn't all it's cracked up to be. If that is too blindingly obvious 
> and pat an answer then I'm sorry.

It's not that it's too pat an answer, it's more that it doesn't address 
the issues I'm getting at here. 

The things I care most about when I'm at work are things like: 

* How long does it take a programmer of average ability to become productive
with technology X ?
* What additional resources are already out there about X for them to fall 
back on? 
(Ie are they going to be sucking up my time everytime there's an issue or 
need help learning)
* Will it play nicely, out of the box, with the typical technologies that
people are used to using here. 
* With minimal application of stick and carrot, will the avergae developer
produce a system which is ultimately maintainable by someone other than
the original developer?
* Will the final product be supportable by a Support team who are not the
dev team and who are either incredibly junior or not technical superstars
and who are in either case a handful of timezones away

I accept that's partly about the technology and partly about the application
you write with it, but for me those concerns trump basically everything else.

Ben