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Why friends don't let friends do J2EE

Michael Sica wrote a post about his experience writing a project manager.

Java, cool I get it. JSP, there's like 3 different ways to do everything. Which do I learn. Application frameworks, started learning Struts - what a nightmare. Stared learning JSF - what a nightmare. Found Spring and Spring MVC, and they rocked. Crap, I need to learn Tiles too. Ok, so how does Tiles work with Spring MVC. Ok that's, cool. I only need to do 6 things everytime I make a form. (I actually have a list printed out so I won't forget all the steps.)

Life's too short. Choose to be productive. Choose Python.

Comments

Anonymous said…
You are kidding right? Do I use, Spyced, Django, Myghty and the other 50 ways to Sunday to do something?
5:44 AM
Jonathan Ellis said…
As opposed to the J2EE world, where there is One True Way to do everything, and only one app server to do it in, right?

In reality, the only place where you don't have these kinds of choices is if you decide to drink the .NET kool-aid and let Microsoft decide for you.
6:32 AM
Tim Lesher said…
Web programming and Python and JSP share the problem of "too many ways to do it."

What counts more to me is how much busywork it takes to actually get things done. I've never worked on a real-life project where choosing the tools was a bigger effort than design and development.

When Michael says "only need to do 6 things everytime I make a form," he's talking about effort that gets expended every time he writes a feature, not once at the beginning of design.

That's where kits like Spyce shine on the Python side: they give you what you need, and get the heck out of your way.
7:26 AM
Anonymous said…
I have to use JSP at work, you need to learn all three ways to do things. We're actually using Struts so we also have to learn all the ways to do things with that, and try to use it in most cases, but invariably we will have a situation where it only works one way, jsp tags once, scriptlets the next, sometimes an ugly combination of the three.
For my home project I decided to use spyce, but I don't get much time to play with it.
8:26 AM
Anonymous said…
I sort of agree - but you have to admit - things like apache axis - make life a lot more elegant and simple. I wish that some of the "python" web and web service frameworks were just as nice.
3:34 PM
Anonymous said…
I wholeheartedly agree. I was a commercial J2EE developer for a few years and it's what I was originally taught at the academic level. Having the experience certainly helps but using it is still a pain and there's FAR too many ways to do things. I know other languages have this methodology of providing numerous tools for the job but J2EE can often seem messy and developing in it often adds a huge overhead in management of the project due to its complexity.

Although J2EE certainly has its place. For large transactional systems used for financial coporations it is by far the best tool. For web-based development, however, you'd be much better using Python, or dare I say it - PHP.

PHP may not be the most 'clean' and 'elegant' of languages but it certainly provides ease and speed of development. Also, If your good with it then there's no reason it can't be scalable and secure.
5:08 PM
Jonathan Ellis said…
PHP the language is such a joke that I can't really recommend that, either.

spyced.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-php-sucks.html
8:44 PM
Anonymous said…
I always like to point out that Friendster shifted from using J2EE to PHP and had very noticeable speed improvements. PHP may be a messy language and does have its 'quirks' but its certainly does the job with speed, scalability and ease of use.
11:27 AM
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