Apache Tomcat 4.0 Final Released

A reader writes "The latest version of the Apache Java Servlet engine has been released. 'The 4.0 release implements the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications.' Read more at The Apache Group's Jakarta site."

Comments

A small correction

[felipeal]

The project is called Jakarta, not Jakarata:

Read more at The Apache Group's Jakarata site.

JSP == pointless complexity

[CurlyG]

Having once been dragged screaming from my cozy, fast and functional PHP nest and been forced into whipping some (very highly paid) Java programmers' woeful attempt at a web-based GUI that used Apache/Tomcat/Linux into some sort of shape, I can attest to the following facts:

• Unless you actually have to talk to a massively complex "Enterprise" system, or leverage some other pre-written Java, JSP is the wrong solution in almost all cases.
• JSPs are insanely difficult to debug. The smallest syntactical error, an inadvertant ommision of a quote or bracket, or basically any other error at all, results in 2 or more screenfuls of verbose, largely irrelevant error messages, somewhere in which is hidden the actual message relevant to the problem.
• JSPs are the ultimate example of the "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" school of programming.
• Outside of my first point, there is basically nothing you can do with JSPs that you can't do with ASP, PHP, Embedded Perl, ColdFusion, etc., etc., all of which have the advantage that they were created from day one to spit out web pages. Mostly you can also do it faster, easier and cheaper, too.
• Just because you happen to have a couple of hot-shot Java programmers handy doesn't mean they have any idea how to do, say, HTML, any more professionally than Joe Bloggs who's just done a 3-week "introduction to the internet" course at the local community center. Or web applications. Horses for courses, in other words.
• Management types love JSPs because it's Java, and they've heard of that, and apparently it's really great!

Admittedly the project I was strong-armed into was particularly ill-suited to JSPs, and I had no experience with Java, but it wasn't Java I had a problem with. I'm a web-app designer and I can do that largely irrespective of the language used.

It's just that the idea of (in a software product) bumping the user's hardware requirements up by about 50%, and the application's total size up by about 100% just to use JSPs for the configuration interface really blew my mind.

Please help stamp out this fucking stupid technology so noone else has to go through the sort of pain I did. (All for nothing as it turned out. 2 days after I'd finished rewriting the Java gurus' HTML code - a 3 month job since they were still writing more shit code as I was fixing what they'd already done - they whole project was canned and all staff layed off.)

I decided to re-write the interface in PHP as personal exercise to fill in some of my now plentiful spare time. It took me one week, worked perfectly, and was considerably faster.