Offtopic:
Hello Zed. I maintain a weblog about web development in Uzbekistan
and
I want to translate and post your story there. I think, it will be
very
helpfull for our local managers and web developers.
So, do you mind if I do
this?
Go ahead. I work for the NYC Department of Correction so I’m allowed
through American free speech laws to talk about my daily work and the
products I use as a “public worker”. In the US since tax payers pay my
salary they have a right to read and learn about my daily work and how
the
DOC operates.
Also I’ve never signed an NDA and that message has no trade secrets.
All
the statements are true according to my observations and I can backup
everything using IBM’s own support request system (we put in a lot of
tickets) and other interactions via e-mail with IBM. There are also
about
10 people who were connected to that project who will probably back up
what
I’ve said.
Basically, feel free to publish it as something I’ve said but don’t
claim
it’s your statements or else they might go after you.
Heh, Zed’s story makes me think of Java like the tax code: it’s
complicated, convoluted, and boring enough to keep the tax professionals
in business and obscure just how much you’re really paying. Also pointed
out at the Java presentations is that many of these open-source
technologies (like Hibernate) are simply teasers for companies’ (like
JBoss) full-fledged, proprietary, for-purchase software.
Offtopic:
Hello Zed. I maintain a weblog about web development in Uzbekistan and
I want to translate and post your story there. I think, it will be
very helpfull for our local managers and web developers.
Also pointed
out at the Java presentations is that many of these open-source
technologies (like Hibernate) are simply teasers for companies’ (like
JBoss) full-fledged, proprietary, for-purchase software.
Let’s stay fair: JBoss is a company, but their product (also called
JBoss) is OpenSource (LGPL).
Let’s stay fair: JBoss is a company, but their product (also called JBoss) is OpenSource (LGPL).
No kidding. To say that JBoss doesn’t support open source software
shows a complete lack of understanding about this topic. It would
make about as much sense as someone deciding that Linux is terrible
and proprietary because Red Hat offers paid support services.
Let’s stay fair: JBoss is a company, but their product (also called JBoss) is OpenSource (LGPL).
No kidding. To say that JBoss doesn’t support open source software
shows a complete lack of understanding about this topic. It would
make about as much sense as someone deciding that Linux is terrible
and proprietary because Red Hat offers paid support services.
Let’s stay fair: JBoss is a company, but their product (also called JBoss) is OpenSource (LGPL).
No kidding. To say that JBoss doesn’t support open source software
shows a complete lack of understanding about this topic. It would
make about as much sense as someone deciding that Linux is terrible
and proprietary because Red Hat offers paid support services.
– James
I’ll let the Java group - which consists of many enterprise developers -
know that you’ll be speaking at the next meeting to inform them on just
how wrong their assertion was.
You’re right.
But if you avoid the JCP standards, Java can still be fun! There are
lots of nice open source libraries for almost anything that work the way
you expect them to work. Still, I must admit that having fun is a lot
easier in RoR.
But, this is a RoR list, so lets not stray too much
On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 07:39:43AM -0800, Peter M. wrote:
} On 2/20/06, Derek C. [email protected] wrote:
}
} > Except that then you have to maintain it.
}
} My options are
} 1) writting and maintaining huge long JavaScript files to create a
rich GUI
Fortunately, other people have designed good JavaScript GUI libraries.
Since they are mostly interacting with HTML and CSS, the well-written
ones
are pretty easy to understand, modify, and maintain.
} 2) Using Java Swing libraries which I won’t have to maintain
…but suck greatly to develop against. Ugh. I have spent entirely too
much
of my life convincing the Swing API to produce the results I desired,
and
that doesn’t count the time and effort involved in using the worst
syntactic sugar ever (anonymous classes) to implement callback code
blocks.
On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 07:39:43AM -0800, Peter M. wrote:
} 1) writting and maintaining huge long JavaScript files to create a rich GUI
Fortunately, other people have designed good JavaScript GUI libraries.
Since they are mostly interacting with HTML and CSS, the well-written ones
are pretty easy to understand, modify, and maintain.
Something that can do multiple drag and drop with auto scrolling,
resizable spreadsheet columns, menu bar, context menu, directory tree,
…?
This is what is making me think Java could be faster for some
application development. Ruby may be a nicer language to program in
but you have to develop libraries along the way.
This can happen. If you have a library that is already 80% of your
app,
using java with that library becomes efficient.
On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 11:11:02AM -0800, Peter M. wrote:
} On 2/20/06, Gregory S. [email protected] wrote:
} > On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 07:39:43AM -0800, Peter M. wrote:
} >
} > } 1) writting and maintaining huge long JavaScript files to create a
rich GUI
} >
} > Fortunately, other people have designed good JavaScript GUI
libraries.
} > Since they are mostly interacting with HTML and CSS, the
well-written ones
} > are pretty easy to understand, modify, and maintain.
}
} Something that can do multiple drag and drop with auto scrolling,
} resizable spreadsheet columns, menu bar, context menu, directory tree,
} …?
A lot of that is out there. The rest should be written. I wrote a
context menu with relative ease, and repurposing it for a menu bar would
be
pretty simple. A directory tree is no problem, and I know of one that is
available commercially. I don’t know what you mean by “multiple drag and
drop” unless you mean selecting multiple items then dragging them; in
that
case, it’s pretty easy. Autoscrolling is a bit of work, but definitely
doable. I’m pretty sure a data table or two are out there, and I would
be
surprised if you can’t resize its columns.
If you really can’t find any one of those, I’d be happy to develop them
for
a small fee and release them under the LGPL.
Yes, probably most of it is out there in the DHTML world but I’m
getting frustrated that it is scattered, incomplete, coded with
different styles, and full of work arounds for browsers. Dealing with
CSS is not exactly a pleasure with all the different browser
compliance levels. It all just seems like a mess.
Perhaps the solution to the mess will be a for-pay company dedicated
to making a cohesive DHTML library that is coded in a uniform style.
The Flex business looks like it has a nice interface. Maybe it is
Rails for Flash. I’m going to read more about it.
I bet you’ve started thinking “this Peter guy never gets anything done
on store.rb”. Well it seems like it is true but I want to build a good
product. Especially for those who have to admin the store. I don’t
want to build osCommerce or Miva for Rails.
I wonder what you think of the options for building a backend.
Spend the time to build the DHTML libraries necessary for a rich
gui interface.
Write a Java app that interfaces with the rails site by web services.
Write a Java app that interfaces with the rails site by web services.
Sorry, but this feels just wrong.
If you develop part of your application in Java and part of your
application in something else, why do you want to use Java
in the part where it is really causing a lot of trouble and
very expensive to use?
Swing is very powerful. No doubt about that.
But it is very complex and you will need a lot of effort to tame
this beast. You will need a lot more effort than you expect
to maintain the Java-installations on your client PCs, unless these
machines are intranet and kind of under your control.
If you do go for Java-Webstart with Swing, I think you should go
for Java on the server as well. That saves you at least some of
the pain with the inter-language-interfaces and you can just go
for RMI, EJB, JMS etc. as communcations mechanism, which is much
easier to tame than Soap or something like that. And it saves
you from implementing the classes that go over the network twice.
No way can you collect the benefit of RoR, if you combine it with a
Java-Swing-GUI. If you need such a rich GUI which can’t be done
with HTML, just get used to having to pay a high price for the
development. And go for it. It’s ok, if you are honest to your
self. It’s not ok if you think you can reproduce any of the success
stories in terms of enormous productivity of RoRs-project with
this combination. That will not work.
The combination of Ruby and Java that I actually do see is like this:
Build components providing a service using Java (or C or C++).
Think of these running on the DB-Server or Application server or so,
close to the database. Then have a web-application in Ruby that
connects to these components to get stuff done. This does make sense
if you have to do operations that are extremely resource hungry
so that Ruby would (today) be too slow. You pay your price but
sometimes it is needed.
Would you see that Ruby on Rails would support this kind of architecture
already or is there still some way to go?
I think I’ve missed the start of this topic. What was the original
web app? e-commerce?
Anyway, in my experience all fat GUI clients to manage a website suck
And it’s not only the language or libraries that they’re built in or
even the app itself.
Building a desktop GUI client is more expensive than building a web
management interface
and you will have to deal later with all kind off end user problems -
crashes, different platforms,
different setups, different runtime versions, hard-to-reproduce
segfaults or memory leaks (yeah, even in managed java or dot net
code). And then you will have to keep the clients up to
date or maintain backwards compatibility in the protocols.
It’s a real pain in the ass, been there - not good.
IMO modern browsers can offer decent user experience with AJAX &
stuff. And if you
really need more advanced UI features - take a look at mozilla XUL.
It’s a kind of ajax on
steroids - you can still use HTML & CSS for layout and interface and
use advanced XUL
widgets if necessary. And it can still be a web app served like an
html page from the server.
