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Software Fashion
fedor writes "Software fashions come and go, but they always claim a few victims on the way. Where there's fashion, you'll find that rather weak willed person who is the Stupid Fashion Victim (or the SFV for short).
This great article from Software Reality is all about fashion in software. Do you all remember WAP? In a couple of years some of the current 'technologies' will be gone too. The article mentions VB.NET, struts and XP as current fashion..."
The Struts tag libraries are incredibly useful for any kind of html form based web app (aka. all of them). Remembering what the user last selected on a form takes a ton of horrible looking code if done with pure jsp or old school servlet/jsp model 2. Struts is also useful for automatically filling out your java bean with data from the http request, validating it according to your rules and sending it back to the input page if there are errors or processing it if there are not.
I will definitely agree that the learning curve for struts is quite steep and the number of files involved per user action is high (1 form bean, 1 action, 1 jsp, 1 xml config file, 1 property file, possibly 1 xml validation file) but there are some IDEs which help out in some cases. The problems are incredibly similar to most MVC frameworks. Using modular design leads to more complex code, its a fact of life.
Struts is certainly not the end all and be all but its better for medium to large projects than the alternatives I've looked at (caveat: I have not investigated JSF which someone mentioned)
If you want to do a key-pair lookup, you use java.util.Hashtable, which has been in Java since version 1.0. Its API has grown some since then, but the original API still works.
Likewise for using Vector as a growable array. These two classes represent most of the use of the Collections classes.
I don't understand your complaint.
Blaming software fashions on SFV is just like blaming flu outbreak on a SVV (stupid virus victim).
Not so. The "stupid" part of SFV means something like "susceptible to memetic infection". So in making an analogy with biological viruses, you'll need to change "stupid" to something which connotes susceptibility to viral invasion (such as sleep deprivation, old age or stress).
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Try Linux International's Linux Counter.
Apple seemed to find a way to interoperate with XMLized Word documents. In Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), any application using the Cocoa text classes can read MS Word files, including the latest XML variants.
I've spent time trying to decipher the Excel file format, and I'd much rather have the XML version than the binary version.
"Now that Debian has lost around 90% of its market share"
.deb format. Rpms and Ebuilds are the new fashion!"
.deb package format.
First of all, how did you divine this number, or rather, how far up your ass did you have to reach to find it? I'm not about to believe an Anonymous Coward's unsupported statistics. The web-based poll on your Geocities homepage is hardly a reliable means of determining marketshare, trends or otherwise.
Unless you are going to give us something better than this: fuck off, troll.
"it is being left out to dry with its anceint packages"
In testing/unstable you will find Gnome 2.2, as well as many accompanying apps updated with 2.4. Watching the lists, I suspect that Gnome 2.4 as a whole will start to make it into unstable within the month.
There are unofficial backports of Gnome 2.2 to woody, and unofficial Gnome 2.4 packages for unstable.
For individual applications (rather than the core of desktop environments), Debian is even more up to date. Oftentimes I can apt-get an official Debian package within a day or two of seeing the announcement on gnomedesktop.org or freshmeat.org.
Neither Redhat nor Suse nor Mandrake can top official (as in through the distribution official package repositories) packages faster than that.
Sure, if the Gentoo community is for you, then you can go ahead with that, but on the view of many, stability and professionalism just are not "there yet" in the Gentoo community, and it may or may not be on a reassuring path to that end, depending on who you ask.
I think that many do not spend the time to learn enough about the Debian community and process to truly appreciate the many many years of work by hundreds of persons that has gone into making it as reliable, scalable, and stable as it is.
Further, maintainers do a good job of keeping up with security updates in testing/unstable; very often the update is concurrent with the stable update, or only a few hours behind. And Gento or Slackware are certainly not in a position to be critical on this issue; absolutely they do not fare better, and many would say not nearly as well. If this isnt' good enough for you, either apply to become Debian Developer and do something about it, or put up with a corporate distribution.
"and deprecated
Ah, "deprecated"? Now I am certain you are trolling. Watching the lists, there are no plans to replace the
Does Gentoo have anything even approaching the Debian Policy Manual?
Heck, Redhat maintains less than half the packages as Debian last I recall, and Redhat is fricking corporate and for-profit.
The only non-official software I have on my primary Debian system (desktop/workstation) is Sun's jre. My system is full featured, up to date, and secure.
My servers are stable and secure, facilitated by a tried and proven process that is transparent, accountable, and well worthy of my trust.
Debian is alive and well.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Struts was the worst thing I ever gotten into. I wrote a survey creation wizard with it. Instead of it taking a week it took me a month to make. The tags don't give you full control like code, so trying to fit it in using the tags made it more messy than code would ever be. Having error messages a properties file takes very little code if you do it right. I'll never touch struts again with a ten foot pull. It might be good for simple forms, but anything half way complex it isn't worth it, in fact it makes it worse. Maybe you can take some IDE that is integrated with struts to use over Macromedia's Coldfusion. Both Coldfusion and struts are bad with anything greater than small size.
Container-managed persistence may have some value, but it's an ancillary feature of EJB and is included as an "add-in." There are lots of libraries and tools to handle Object/Relational mapping, and the other ones work as well but do not involve the complexity and overhead of EJB.
Not to mention, it appears that container-managed persistence usually just maps each instance variable to a single column in a relational table, with each object being a row. Thus, the code rendered unnecessary by container-manager persistence was actually quite trivial, and the persistence mechanism handles the simplest cases only. The more complicated cases must use bean-managed persistence, which requires as much custom programming as avoiding EJB altogether.
I'm sincerely quite curious to learn what is the actual benefit of EJB. It's possible, of course, that there is some benefit of which I'm unaware. All of the claimed benefits, like scalability and simplicity, seem to be falsely claimed. If there is some situation in which EJBs are genuinely called for, then I'd be grateful if you'd tell me what it is.
Thanks...