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

[Nigel Rantor]

Ben Evans wrote:
> 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.

Yes, that's why I went on to frameworks on top of JSP, I just started 
there to get the "JSP is borken anyway" thought down first.

One of the main things about JSP (or possibly this is just an 
implementation detail on most platforms I have seen) that makes me want 
to never work with it again is the configuration.

It is the worst configuration system I have seen other than sendmail.

I cannot recall off-hand but either the spec, or at least the Tomcat 
implementation dictate the ORDER of sections in the XML config. If it 
isn't in the correct order it isn't used. Gah!

So, if I were to take your points one by one I think that JSP loses, 
it's just that there has been such a push by Sun that there are hundreds 
of people out there that *know* the quirks of the system, that doesn't 
mean it's good.

   n