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Going beyond JSP with Ruby and Seaside
An anonymous reader writes "The Java community has used JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology through most of the last decade, but signs of rust are starting to show. Longstanding conventions inhibit Java programmers from using Java code within Web pages now. Other languages handle Web development much better than Java. This article discuss how code generation works in Ruby, and it delve into a more radical component-based approach in Seaside."
Come on! How many times must we endure these kinds of debates? Just use the right tool for the job. You could say there are signs of nothing but rust on COBOL yet it's still very heavily used in financial applications (back end). There is nothing gained by making inflamatory statements, just state the benefits of Seaside and Ruby and leave other languages out of it.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
I know I'm going to have a hard time convincing the PHP audience of this, but the conventions preventing people from using code in JSP are a good thing. You're going to have a hard time selling me a solution that makes it easier to mix my business logic and presentation, even if it's written in a language I like (like Ruby or Smalltalk).
It's better than JSP? Yay. So is everything else developed in the last ten years (and some systems developed before). The Java community has moved on to alternative presentation technologies -- WebWork, JSF, GWT, and the myriad XSLT frameworks come to mind.
Now, if it's more productive than GWT or JSF...well, then we'll talk. But don't attack the strawman of JSP. That's like saying "Ruby is better than Perl 4!"
One look at the author being Bruce Tate, and you wonder why they didn't just link to his book at the top of the article instead of the bottom. Way to go Brucey!
The main article here says 'there are better languages for web than java', or something to that effect. How irrelevant. This article is about JSP, not Java. One could in theory write a ruby language bytecode compiler/interpreter for Java and use it there.
JSP has issues, yes, but some of us dont even use it for our web VIEWS, which are independent of the java backend, (if you're an architect worth hiring, anyway) -- for which Java is unparalled in doing the job. Try to scale like Java does with Ruby at the backend. Good luck.
I live and work in Switzerland and our sites have to handle 4 or more languages. When Ruby has unicode support built in, I'll take another look at it. Until then, it's Java, python and php for me.