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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)
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).
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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.
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...