Quickies

Posted on Oct 14, 2004

I’ve been doing some looking around at some various technical topics, and here are the results.

Back to Reston

I am going to attend the November NFJS conference in Reston in early November. I’m interested to see the new workshops, this get together promises to be just as interesting as the first. Maybe I’ll try to be more sociable.

Tapestry Demoted to AAA

I think that Tapestry has found its way to the minors. I was reading Tapestry In Action, and the much-discussed learning curve simply seems too steep. There’s a very important Tapestry construct called “rewind mode” that places specific restrictions on how the end developer codes. At some point, we’ve all got to turn the works over the code monkeys (after first being one ourselves) and I just don’t think it’ll work.

If you have a smart team, maybe it’ll be fine for you. I certainly don’t want to say anything derogatory, but it does not seem to fit my needs. I may, at some point, decide that the speed with which a new web page is developed doesn’t matter, but it can’t be right now.

No Echo

I checked out the Echo framework, which is totally unsuitable. I expect to put massive amounts of JavaScript and top-notch HTML designs in our pages; Echo is simply a non-starter with this requirement. You will think that you are coding a SWING app.

EchoPoint and its CSS support look good, but specifying CSS texts in Java code does not seem like a good solution to me. You wouldn’t put HTML text in Java code, and I see only a subtle difference between the two. Looks like I’ll have to check out Java Server Faces next. I somehow have a feeling we’ll be ending up with Spring MVC and a lot of custom code writing.

It’s a Gem

I’ve been fiddling with Ruby, motivated by the support of the Pragmatic Programmers, and the very impressive video demo of Rails, which is worth downloading Quicktime to watch, if you’re into web applications. I love OS X, but I don’t have it. I’m trying to bluff my way through a Windows / CygWin installation and it is not pretty. More updates when I have them.