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How about a System Optimization Guide For Web Admins instead...

Considered using FOP for your reporting? That way you get more layout control than with HTML, your final output is in PDF format, you can use XSLT to build the stylesheets to do the formatting (and just have your program output XML to the reporting layer)... generally cool stuff.

Actually, having done app development with both PHP and the Jakarta tools, I'd say you can't beat Jakarta and PostgreSQL as an application platform.

Apache is a (sic) "IIS Killer"

I think you have it backwards. IIRC, httpd was originally written by NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana, on some flavor or another of BSD or SYSV Unix (BSD, if I remember right...), and is older than NT3.1, at least for purposes of availability. Apache is the end result of a bunch of server admins patching the NCSA sources after NCSA quit supporting httpd (A Patchy Web Server).

The concept of the GUI (and the mouse, for that matter) date back to Xerox PARC in 1975. Incidentally, that was the same time MSwas founded. IIRC, they were selling a BASIC interpreter for some architecture or another of Intel 8008 or 8080 (anybody know the answer to that one?), probably for PL/1, out of Albuquerque, NM. Apple released the first real GUI desktop machine with the LISA in 1983. Windows 1.0 was released around '85 or '86 (the "look-and-feel" suit of Apple vs. MS was basically tossed out because Apple's UI was too close to the PARC Star UI).

As far as invention and innovation go, look to Universities and pure R&D shops. Don't look to Microsoft, unless you want accounting and marketing innovation. DOS has a rather interesting history, as does IE, at least as far as the licensing deals go.

"Do you want to live in a world where things like the GUI, 3D graphics, wordprocessing, webserving, and other commercial products were never developed?"

Most, if not all, of these technologies, originated either on pure proprietary platforms, long since extinct, or on some flavor or another of unix. Word processing in its most raw form has existed since computing cycles became cheap enough for it to be practical. 3D really took off with SGI IRIX and SGI GL, and moreso with OpenGL. In all fairness, MS did join the OpenGL steering council, but they needed to find a way to get around the limitations of the Windows GDI under NT 3.1 so that they could go after the CAD/engineering market.

I will credit you with your point about the arrogance, and to a lesser degree, the "chasing taillights" syndrome. Many people will not try something presented to them with the "[insert commercial product here] Killer" as the main advertising point.

1) It's big and slow. Very big. Very slow. Java apps/applets aren't usable on my P2 266

2) It has the worst marketing and learning curve in the history of computer programing. All those acronyms above are real. Sun's J2EE "platform" -- platform? what the fuck is a platform? -- is used as a generic term by PHBs everywhere. To anyone that hasn't taken courses on Java, it's meaningless.

The day I found Velocity was the day I forgot JSP existed. Unless this new tool can somehow manage to provide even more power and flexibility than servlets + Velocity templating (with a smidgen of Javascript for controlling form data entry), it's DOA to me.

I think half the reason MS is so dominant is not the software but the books. Go to any bookstore. Somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of the computer section is taken up with MS books from beginner to advanced. I often used MS books to learn programs like Excel and still do in teaching.

Lately, I have noticed open sourced projects almost leaving off documentation entirely. Look at the Java Standard Tag Library (JSTL) over at jakarta. They actually recommend books you can read, or if you are not willing to shell out, to look at the spec (which is actually somewhat accessible). The question is whether those books are as accessible as other books oriented at newbies or even intermediate users. Further, one might ask if an almost total lack of documentation in the extreme case (e.g., JSTL) is fair to the community.

I think the poster is ultimately correct. Open source is developed by the community for use by its own members. It is not unreasonable to expect people who want the fruits of that community to pay. Book publishing is one method for achieving that.

BTW, I do think packagers such as mozilla or redhat have a value-add, but others have already talked well about this.

I'll never forget my first boot into the 1.x series many, many years ago.

From that day on, I never looked at a computer the same way. Whenever friends would talk about the latest cool games or case modifications, I was never really interested; what truly grabbed my attention was exploring the depths of the Linux kernel and just learning, learning, learning.

The rest is, as they say, history. I've gained a lot from using Linux, moreso than any other person or thing that I've used so far in my short life. With that being said, I decided to donate, once again, to Linux and its related movements just as a simple "Thank You" for all the time and dedication that so many, like Linus, put into the Free/Open software movement.

Here are some quick donation links:
- FSF
- Mandrake
- KDE
- Apache

I'm not sure how much traffic they get these days, but the InfoWorld website is XML based. I believe it uses server-side XSLT transforms to turn XML into HTML.

Also, don't assume that just because the URLs don't have ".xml" in them that the site isn't using XML - it's often transparent, such as when using Apache Cocoon

In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA. Sun mhas also fully opened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP).

There those that claim that .NET is open to re-implementation, but until Microsoft make a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA, any .NET reimplementation represents a pending legal mindfield.

It's also not a raw dump of memory, it's objects that have been serialized into OLE structured storage

In Windows, its even easier. Install the installshield script, and place your jsps and servlets into the default directory. Voila.

You can even get struts installed by plopping the struts jar file into the deploy directory, and it'll autodeploy struts instantly.

Here is a third: because SVG is XML, it is much easier to generate it dynamically on the server.

For example, you can generate SVG using Java Server Pages (JSP), and you can transform another XML document to SVG using XSLT. Apache FOP, for instance, supports SVG targets out of the box.

So what I've had Ant Running on my apple laptop for months. I didn't get any slashdot press.

1. Integrated unit testing. Thats Junit and junit reporting, plus extensions like cactus (they couldnt call it EJBUnit or sun would sue them) and httpunit.
   
2. Deployment: email, ftp, custom tasks for the various app servers out there. Its tasks even smart enough to understand about timestamp dependencies to and from an FTP server, down an http get and other places where makefile is limited.
   
3. Xdoclet. Xdoclet turns javadoc tags into code and xml, for those drudge work interfaces (EJB, JMX) and XML deployment descriptors (taglibs, web.xml, EJB, struts, etc). Xdoclet changes how you code. Try it.
   
4. Integration with the rest of the open source build tree. I get Ant from CVS every am, then get Axis, and my build process rebuilds axis before i rebuild my own web service. Granted. I am a committer on both so sometimes I fix axis more than my own code, but integration to the core open source projects is convenient. Take a look at
   the gump to see the nightly build of everything that uses Ant. The gump also shows that ant does scale up nicely
   

Batik is a wonderful application for many SVG activities. Runs just about anywhere.

SVG can be used like flash , and you can use javascript to manipulate the shapes on page.

See batikfor an apache implementation of it and some examples (quite nice ones) , and adobe provides a nice viewer for the svg too..

The good point bt vector graphics is that it is scalable , and sizing of images do not affect the clarity/sharpness of the images

---

My former organization (an NGO) attempted an single signon project for inn, rsync, & Apache 2 years ago. This was to be: a newsserver server, a webfrontend of the newsserver, web publishing, authoring tools, etc. We decide that LDAP was probably the best solution for a single signon.

Unfortunately back then, the software wasn't up to snuff, we had limited development experience to improve the existing tools, and we went bankrupt, and handed the project off to some other NGOs.

I've been recently laid off (Different company), and have been researching this project again. I'm amazed at the amount of progress that has been made since 2 years ago. It seems like LDAP is a good solution for single signon projects.

Apache 2.0 has added native support for LDAP, ldap; and there are several low-profile INN+LDAP projects out there (No large formal projects). I hear it's a good solution for remote-transfer users, like your 'scp' project.

Definately check out LDAP.

Ant is not meant be a scripting language.

It is meant to be a declarative language to be interpreted by an engine; there have been multiple implementations of the ant engine (there are two in ant CVS), which can take the same XML declaration and build things because of it.

XML is a different issue. Yes it can be ugly, but compared to the secret tab characters in make, it is better. You can use XML editors (I use jedit) to edit it, and its easy to generate ant build files from higher level specification files using XSLT and other XML processing chains. Or vice versa: there are tools to take ant files and parse and navigate them, such as the IDEA, forte and jedit and plugins, or the vizant ant project visualiser.

Also look at maven
which is a high level wrapper around ant for real project work.

But thank you for your AAP pointer; i will look at it.

Steve Lougran.

I bought the book, and that's saying a lot because I'm very cheap. It's a great book that doesn't just teach you how to use Ant, it teaches you how to do lots of things with Ant, like build web services using the excellent Apache Axis, which can automatically create a web service from any Java class source file. It also teaches you how to use JUnit to do automated unit testing with Ant, how to use CruiseControl, etc., etc.

A lot of posters have complained that XML isn't very human-readable. I use and highly recommend a great little tool called Pollo. It has built in support for creating Ant build.xml files, as well as Cocoon sitemap files, XML schemas, etc. IMHO, it's got the best XML editing GUI I've found.

I bought the book, and that's saying a lot because I'm very cheap. It's a great book that doesn't just teach you how to use Ant, it teaches you how to do lots of things with Ant, like build web services using the excellent Apache Axis, which can automatically create a web service from any Java class source file. It also teaches you how to use JUnit to do automated unit testing with Ant, how to use CruiseControl, etc., etc.

A lot of posters have complained that XML isn't very human-readable. I use and highly recommend a great little tool called Pollo. It has built in support for creating Ant build.xml files, as well as Cocoon sitemap files, XML schemas, etc. IMHO, it's got the best XML editing GUI I've found.

Why, really? Guess what, in the rest of the world we also develop Ant with Java!

Ant is also capable of checking to see if required libraries are available. The sample JBoss development project includes this capability to check for the existence of the XDoclet task.

For instance, there is this task that ships with Ant:
Available Task

Most of the time in Java you don't have to worry that much about what endianness, etc. that you would normally do with C or C++, so I think in practice Ant does a very capable job.

If one uses BeanShell you can also do some pretty powerful custom tasks, including writing light-weight Java scripts (not a typo :-) to do all kinds of checks if you need to... not to mention that it is relatively simple to write Ant tasks for all kinds of build needs, including creating jars of classes by dependencies, code metric collection, etc.

I know of a development house that generated a pretty sophisticated code work set system using Ant scripts, add-on tasks, and some bean shell scripts.

It also has some options to avoid recompiling all Java files when only some have changed, just like make.

Any Java project I have seen that uses Ant and distributes source has been very easy for me to compile... I would say as easy as autoconf if not easier... and I've found Ant a lot simpler to learn than autoconf.

Having said that, there are some irritating things with Ant (trying to make filesets out of paths is one that springs to mind). And I am certainly a fan of ./configure;make;make install.... but it is all about the right tool for the right job, and Ant is pretty much the de facto answer as far as Java development is concerned.

... the Java equivalent of make and makefiles. (...for those that don't know. They really didn't give a capsule explanation in the review) I personally like to develop java from the commandline, and Ant's conditional compilation (only compiling files that have changes) saves tons of time. Not to mention that it is quite useful in rolling out and configuring products. Even if you use an ide like Forte, it would probably be a good idea and head to the Ant page and see what is all about.

Also, it has become somewhat of the defacto standard in open source Java development.

I have been working on a medical application using OSX, PHP, Apache, Mysql. What does this have to do with Cold Fusion? well the application was written originally in cold fusion. What I have found is that CF is great for rapid application development and proof of concept however is it not a deployment solution. If you are with a microsoft partner as you claim .. stay with their products ... otherwise all the people saying open source are correct. Also one should think twice about asking about MS products here it is essentially the same as asking people to flame you.

Remember kids: Your computer may be safe, but the computer you connect from may be a skeezy gutter snipe. If you have to use someone else's computer use a Linux bootable CD with ssh and stunnel. If you are on a foriegn network, pack that laptop and use those tools.

System admin

web programming

standalone applications

quick and dirty scripts
In addition, it's a lot of fun !

I ran into this problem recently at work. I am developing for an app server in java, and we have decided to have it run through XML. This way we can have our powerbuilder gui app and our java servlet website (using xslt) use the same appserver. We tried using Apache's jxpath, but I found it too limited in its support for xpath.

Instead I implemented my own jdom like system that uses xpath to find noes in a document using Xalan's xpath API. This gives me the flexibility of xpath and the usefulness of a DOM-like XML api. I was thinking of porting it to C++ for use at home.

I ran into this problem recently at work. I am developing for an app server in java, and we have decided to have it run through XML. This way we can have our powerbuilder gui app and our java servlet website (using xslt) use the same appserver. We tried using Apache's jxpath, but I found it too limited in its support for xpath.

Instead I implemented my own jdom like system that uses xpath to find noes in a document using Xalan's xpath API. This gives me the flexibility of xpath and the usefulness of a DOM-like XML api. I was thinking of porting it to C++ for use at home.

Have you tried the Xalan type stuff? http://xml.apache.org

At apache you can use mod_rewrite to forbid access to files ending with a tilde automatically. Optionally, turn off backups at your ~/.emacs or set the backups directory out of your public_http.

4) the best way you can take action is probably by taking one of the toy applications that are currently available for the 'free' os's and turn it into something real, it's a level playingfield out there.

Well I assume if your posting on /. you are familiar with CVS? Go to this page and grab a copy of the source. All you need to compile is the java sdk and the ant build tool.

I recommend looking at the ICU4C (International Components for Unicode for C) libraries, which are available at http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/. ICU is a set of thread-safe cross-platform open source Unicode libraries. The project has some examples of how it builds and tests on multiple platforms.

It's being used by many other projects and companies. For example, it works very well with the Xerces C++ project. The ICU readme.html has the list of platforms that can build ICU.

Try the Apache Portable Runtime Project.

Don't write Makefiles yourself. Instead write a script that translates simple build rules (foo.cpp -> foo.o -> foo.exe) into a custom Makefile for each platform. I went this route after battling for years with complex Makefile rules that never quite worked.

A wonderful alternative to make is Jakarta Ant. It's java based, but there are ways to get it to work with C/C++ files and compilers. You can create an entire build/test/deploy process with Ant.

All the posts recomending you change languages aside, we're in the same boat as you. Multiple compilers over multiple platforms. Rewriting code is simply not an option.

We're actually moving from a complex system of Makefiles to tool very similar to Ant.

I don't understand why people even look at Makefiles anymore now that Ant exists. We've completely automated all of our builds and deploys across NT, Linux and Solaris with it, across different architectures and different locations.

I'm not going to expound on using Java, since it is fairly ubiquitous these days and if it would work for you, I'm sure you would have already considered it.

Ant is an excellent alternative to Makefiles. It might not solve all your problems, but you should at least be able to simplify your build process quite a bit.

Apache Ant

I would suggest first using gcc on all UN*X platforms, and also trying out something like ant instead of the various forms of make you're dealing with now.

Also, have you considered using a library like Qt to handle most of the porting details? It's not free, but it is good if you can deal with it's oddities (I personally consider preprocessing to be evil).

Good luck.

I've never heard of MVP, but the book makes mention of a very classic pattern: MVC (Model-View-Controller). MVC is actually heavily used in Java web development as an architecture for developing the front tier. Generally, when you hit the site, a master Controller uses CGI parameters or the request URI or both to dispatch to a sub-Controller which handles that specific type of request. The Controller is responsible for collecting data into a Model, which is basically one or more Java objects, and putting that into a request object (or session). Model objects are generally relatively dumb data-containing objects, sometimes called JDO (Java Data Objects) or JavaBeans. JDO are more focused on getting stuff out of a persistant store. The Controller then hands that Model off to a View, which is generally a JSP (or ASP, or whatever). The idea is that, given a different parameter, the Controller could hand that same model off to a different View - say you wanted to generate a page for a wireless device, just dispatch to the wireless View.

This pattern is more of an architectural design pattern, whereas this book focuses mainly on object model design patterns. But the MVC model is actually used heavily today. Check out Struts, which is quickly becoming a standard framework for web application development.

MFC also has some MVC in it, but they call their Model a "Document", and their Controller an "Application." Check out MSDN.

-If

Since Adobe itself is heavily into SVG, it (SVG) is positioned to become the leading display document format. This is, in some ways, ironic, because most people think of SVG as an image format.

Consider:

1. Autotrace will generate PS (PDF's older brother) and SVG (among other things)
2. FOP will generate document output as PS, PDF, and SVG (among other things).
3. Most vector graphics programs for Linux have some SVG support, and Sodipodi uses SVG as its native document format. Open/StarOffice will generate SVG as well.

Are you saying that performance shouldn't be taken into consideration when deciding what "proper coding practices" are?

Yes. Now let me explain:

You're right that performance is important, and teaching performance techniques is important; however, there are times when that's not what you want to teach.

Example 1: Let's say we're going to teach a "hello world" application that displays "Hello World" in a web browser. Let's say I decide to do it with PHP or JSP or ASP and get the string from a database. Is that really the best way to print "Hello World?" No. Absolutely not. You'd just write the HTML and be done with it. In this case, you're trying to show how a technology works, not the best way to solve the "print 'hello world'" problem.

Example 2: For my work I recently did a simple Jakarta Struts example. It basically just queried a table from one of several databases and printed it out in HTML. It was overly complicated for just this task (did validation, internationalization, muliple views...). Now if I really wanted to put this application in a production environment, is this how I would code it? Probably not. It's overkill for this particular example. But what I was teaching was the techniques of database transactions, validatation, etc. We have other applications in development that do need these features. So what I was teaching was not "How to overly complicate your application." but "A trivial example using complicated techniques you will one day need to use." The problem with this comes when developers cannot understand when such features are needed and when they're overkill.

Back to our Java vs .NET example. I think the argument being made here is that Sun did a 'trivial' example to show how things work. Microsoft just wrote the (to use my previous example) 'html' version of 'hello world'. Is Microsoft's approach wrong? No, that's probably how you should write such an application. The problem comes when you try to compare and benchmark the two. So Middleware tries to rewrite the Java version to optimize it and it's still bad. Conclusion? Well, the whole point of this discussion is that Rickard Öberg claims that Middleware didn't do a proper job of rewriting it.

I do agree with some other posters that it would be nice to see someone take the java petstore example and really do it right. Perhaps .NET would still win. Fine. That's great. But until then, spreading inconclusive results is only spreading more FUD.

So will they use the dated Theological Markup Language (ThML)? Or do they go with Cocoon/TomCat to mark-up this data the same way the CCEL does?

So will they use the dated Theological Markup Language (ThML)? Or do they go with Cocoon/TomCat to mark-up this data the same way the CCEL does?

I would have liked to have at least seen Tcl listed in the "why we didn't choose X" section, as there are a lot of good reasons to use it, that jive very nicely with the reasons he gives for using PHP. AOL
uses Tcl in their (free software) web server, for instance. There is also the stuff (disclaimer - I work on it) at:

tcl.apache.org

There are reasons not to use it, too, but it's a pity that it wasn't even investigated.

Mandrake
Redhad
OpenOffice
Apache
StarOffice

How about these fine competing products for basic Microsoft desktop/server software? Ones that work approximately as well as Microsoft's.

Mason isn't the only way to get "code in the page" There are lots of alternatives. eperl, HTML::Template, templatetoolkit, etc. There's a pretty good discussion of the pros and cons over at Apache . You might stop inventing the wheel.