Contrary to popular belief, the accesible uranium deposits are very exhaustible. If the world switched to nuclear for all its energy needs, the uranium price would go way up. Here are estimates of uranium reserves.
I did not know that, but I'm not too surprised. (How efficient are our reactors, by the way? I.e., how much energy capacity do those uranium reserves represent?)
I was actually thinking of fusion with that statement. A man's gotta dream.:) We will not run out of deuterium any time soon. And though we've had little success with fusion before, I think it's only a matter of time.
Why no hydrogen cars? Well, it could have something to do with hydrogen being a net-loss fuel; it takes more energy to make than it provides.
That's thermodynamics. It's true for any fuel. It's even true for oil and nuclear energy - the difference being only that the energy wasn't put in during our lifetime. (And in the case of nuclear, that the pre-existing energy is all but inexhaustible.)
Some of the coolest features of the Itanium are also some of the reasons why a lot of people don't want to use it. The EPIC ISA, for example. It was designed ( along w/ the physical hardware ) to expose a lot of the internal workings of the processor to the user. But rather than recompile and re-optimize their code, people would rather bitch about migration. That's fine for workstations and servers, but in an HPC environment, you want the nifty features, you want to occasionally hand-tune code segments in assembler, etc.
I just coded some IA-64 assembly and from what I've seen, this comment is dead-on. They've got a lot of interesting features:
Speculation. The idea is to do memory fetches far in advantage to avoid waiting for the (much slower) memory system. You can do a LD.S operation that tells the machine something like "I might want the value from this memory address in a few instructions." It fetches it from memory, if it's in a good mood. If the address is paged out, it doesn't get it. (Instead, it sets a NaT (not a thing) bit to tell you nothing useful is there.) Later, you do a CHK.S. If it turns out that the speculative load fails, it jumps to some "recovery" code which gets it for real.
Lots of registers. 128 general-purpose 64-bit registers. Floating point registers. Some specialized ones, I think.
EPIC. (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing.) It has different types of instructions, aimed at different execution units. In the current incarnation, there are two sets of these in each processor. You give it bundles of three instructions, more broadly divided into groups. Instructions in a group don't depend on any earlier results calculated by the group, so they can be executed in parallel.
Rotating registers. This lets you make different iterations of the same loop work with different registers, to take advantage of EPIC more fully.
Predicated instructions. There are a bunch (16? 64? don't remember) of predicate bits, set by the CMP instruction and the like. Every instruction has an associated predicate. (p0 is hardcoded to true, so you normally don't notice.) So you can do conditional execution without jumping. More efficient, especially if it's just a few instructions that differ.
If you just have a simple sequence of operations, each dependant on the one before, you can't really take advantage of these capabilities. (My code was like this. Even though performance wasn't my reason for writing assembly, it was a little disappointing that I couldn't play with the new toys.) If you're expecting these features to make Word start faster, you'll probably be disappointed.
But if you're doing intensive computations in a tight loop, you can do amazing things. If you can get all the execution units working simultaneously, it will fly. And the features like rotating registers are designed to make that possible. You need a very good compiler or a very smart person to hand-tune it. You may need to recompile to tune if your memory latency changes (affecting how many iterations to run at once) or they come out with a new chip with more sets of execution units. But in a situation like this, none of that is a problem. They'll have applications designed to run as fast as possible on this machine. They may never be run anywhere else.
A system to track people on trails already exists. It is called the Trail Head Log Book. You know, you open the box, sign in and then when you get back you sign out.
The people they're searching for may not use it.
It just says they're on the trail. It doesn't say which way they went or how far they are. Installing sensors at critical junctions, as he proposed, would come closer.
There are also weight sensitive pads that get buried under the trail that counts the number of people who pass it.
No, this is what he is proposing. Maybe they already are installed in other places, but not where he is.
First off, hikers are already tracked. Before you go on any long distance hike, you should typically sign in at a local ranger station. These are usually where the best drop-off points and parking lots are. Plus, it's just good to be face to face with a ranger before hitting the woods. At least then, they will have a face in memory, just in case you turn up missing.
Dude, read the post.
First, this guy works with a Search and Rescue team. He doesn't need you telling him what hikers should do before setting out.
Second, "should typically"? The people who they're likely to be searching for are the people least likely to do what they should do.
Third, his goal is to know something more than if someone is missing. He wants to know where. That's why he suggested adding these sensors at critical trail junctions.
And by the way...
No offense, just an honest thought on the issue. I grow weary of people searching for technical solutions to mundane things that can be done better through arcane methods.
I do not think arcane means what you think it means.
Dood, any pie chart that doesn't add up to 100% is broken.
Right, so any pie chart about this information is broken. Make the graph fit the subject, not the other way.
Well, almost any. I suppose you could put in OS use as a percentage of a person's computer time. And then aggregate across people, either equally or weighted by total time spent in front of a computer. But even then, I'm frequently using two computers at the same time (through ssh). Which do I count? Both? Do I divide the time by two then, or are we back to adding up to more than 100%?
Ok, RAM chips are probably a bit of a special case. Since manufacturers want to group them into bytes it makes sense to use the same units. And it's not usually something that the general public come across, so I guess it's ok.
It's not the only such place. It's just the first one I thought of.
Here's one going the other way (using powers of two with bytes). SCSI transfer rates are typically given in MBps. They mean 8 or 16 bytes per clock at N MHz. Since we've already established MHz means powers of 10, that means the MBps here is in powers of 10 also.
Look it's very simple. Bytes are measured in base-2 units, everything else is base-10.
Your rule is nice and simple, but also wrong.
Consider RAM capacity (which I forgot to put in the quiz). If you look on an individual chip of a DIMM, you'll frequently see the capacity written in Mb. That means 2^20 bits. (It might also be a little higher than you'd expect; they might include the ECC bits in that count. I don't remember for sure.)
The hard drive manufacturers want to use base-10 units so that their drives sound larger than they really are. Everywhere else, base-2 units are used for measurements of bytes (including your file browser).
If you ever happen upon a really old Windows system, look more closely. IIRC there was at least one place that said MB and meant powers of 10. It's "obviously" a bug (and long since corrected), but I can easily see how it happened.
Another quiz item I forgot: floppy disks. A "floppy megabyte" (as in 1.44 MB) is 1000 * 1024 bytes.
How easy is it for you to sleep at night knowing your job is dependant on Linux succeeding, yet MS software staying popular? You are living in a paradox of a job!
Forgive me for posting a serious reply to a joke, but:
There's no paradox. Not only is there room for more than one significant OS (say 60% Windows, 40% Linux), but OS use is not mutually exclusive. That is, it could be 80% Windows, 30% OS X, 20% Linux. Any pie chart that shows OS use adding up to 100% is either oversimplified ("primary"? what does that mean?) or wrong.
Foelisted for daring to suggest that the bastard known as MiB (along with KiB, GiB, TiB...) is somehow more correct or "better" than the well-known, universally accepted, industry standard MB (kB, GB, TB...).
Foe-listed for being so closed-minded that you won't even consider listening to people who have ever spoken an opposing view. Worse yet - being proud of it. (Moderators - +4? You should be ashamed of yourselves.)
By the way, please add me to your foe list. I consider those 99 people to be good company.
Why are we letting vendors of hard disks re-scale the units of measurement so that their products appear larger by having bigger numbers on the box, its madness.
Because their motivations aside (profit, of course), the units make much more sense as they use them. The old computer science terms are inappropriate and grow more inappropriate every day, considering that the boundary between computer science and other things has been blurred for a long time and will only become more so.
At least the hard drive manufacturers have a little asterick next to every size they report and a footnote that states their meaning plainly.
Pop quiz: which definition applies to the following situations?
network bandwidth at the raw hardware level (i.e., 100 Mbps Ethernet)
network bandwidth at higher levels (Mozilla reporting 100 KBps)
CPU speed (i.e., a 1 GHz Athlon)
Disk usage, in the modern file browser of your choice (they differ)
I asked: Do you have any source for the idea that barbers were still performing surgery until the 1900s?
Twirlip of the Mists responded: Barbers did these things whenever doctors (and dentists!) were not available. That goes up to the early part of the 20th century, and even as late as the 19-teens in some rural parts of America and Europe.
Source? You've just repeated what you've said before, and I'm no more likely to believe it this time.
Do you know what would happen to you if you broke your arm in 1900? [...] Your barber--unless you were one of the relatively few people who lived in or very near a big city, your barber would be your sole source of medical assistance--would reduce the fracture badly, and the absence of anything like a cast would guarantee that it would not set properly [...] Only about four generations separate us from a standard of living that many of us would find to be just barely above proto-humans scrabbling around in the dust.
What you've said seems accurate...except the dates. My impression was that barbers did these things until the 16th century or so. Do you have any source for the idea that barbers were still performing surgery until the 1900s? Wikipedia, for what it's worth, says here that they did so in medieval times and earlier. (I.e., until the 15th century or so.)
Okay, so the HS teacher may be less motivated [...]
In my experience, high school teachers are more motivated. It makes sense when you think about why they're there. For a high school teacher, it's not the research, and it's certainly not the money. Professors are better-paid and often teaching is secondary to their other duties.
You're definitely right overall; high school is a better place to learn calculus.
I read somewhere that an average man has 2-3 pounds of bacteria in his gut and on his skin, more in weight than found on the most dirty shower curtain. Most of these bacteria are actually needed (for digestion, immune system etc) and we would die without them.
They're definitely necessary for proper digestion. When I take antibiotics, I also eat yogurt every day - the bacteria they use to culture it are the same as the bacteria you're supposed to have in your digestive system. They should come back naturally, but eating yogurt will speed things up and save you from some misery.
And since I mentioned antibiotics - other important things to know about them:
don't take them for colds or viral infections - they don't help. And overusing antibiotics is bad. Here in the US, doctors have to prescribe them, which helps...but they're still overprescribed. And in some places (Mexico), you can buy antibiotics over-the-counter. That's bad.
always take the full course. If you stop taking them when you feel better, you risk developing resistant strains. That screws you and everyone else.
It helps ignorant people justify their decision to disinfect EVERYTHING, thus inhibiting childrens' development of robust immune systems.
On a related note, do you know if there's any truth to the idea that a too-clean environment can cause our overactive immune systems to develop allergies? (I.e., should I blame mom?)
e-mail is not a reliable system. Take a look at these. e-mail's level of reliability won't cut it at a financial institution or many govt agencies.
Email is mostly reliable in the sense that if the message fails to deliver, you should eventually get a bounce telling you why. Those links were complaining about:
messages bouncing - a silly thing to complain about. The protocol designers and implementors put a lot of work into things like ensuring that when disk space is unavailable, the sender gets a 4xx (temporary failure) response. And that mailservers retry these, and eventually give up with a bounce. Bounces mean that the system is reliable, not unreliable. They mean it never just loses track of your message.
messages being silently dropped - the most common reason is bad spam checking. The commonly available mail server software is quite reliable, but anti-spam stuff tends to be something someone has kludged on locally, and they often do it with little understanding of the reliability concerns.
The grandparent was talking about the search engine having 1-2% losses. In email, this would be messages silently dropped, not a bounce. People wouldn't stand for that kind of reliability problems. Either gmail is more reliable than this (and thus, their distributed system can be reliable when it needs to be) or a lot of people will be complaining about gmail soon.
To summarize: I won't disagree with you that email is not reliable enough for certain applications, but it's certainly more reliable than they said the search engine is. Thus, their implementing an email system on the same distributed system indicates to me that the distributed system is reliable.
> > If it went faster than the speed of light, it would also be going faster than the speed of time. That would cause quite a bit of technical difficulties on the receiving end.
> Speed of time? Excuse me, but can I get some of what you're smoking? How would you define a concept like that?
You're right; "speed of time" is nonsense.
Maybe he's trying to say is that object's world line would become space-like rather than time-like. (Which is true.) Mathematical definition here. Some information about the consequences here. (Not much, though. But I'm too tired to find a better link and much too tired to think independently.)
1. Singleton Actions.
I've read that this was due to performance, but that seems rather silly. If instantiating a form bean and populating it via reflection is acceptable, why is creating an instance of an Action a problem?
Let me ask that the other way: what benefit would there be to a different structure? I have not heard those performance arguments (and they do sound suspect), but I don't see any reason to change.
2. Decoupling Actions and Form beans.
Frankly, the seperation of Action (behavior) and Form (data) seems anti-OO.
Well, the important thing about the form is that it's a self-contained entity that knows how it is validated. That's a very OO concept and is useful when you have forms shared between actions. In my case, I don't have any shared forms, so I use DynaActionForms and validate them from the Actions. But it's nice to know I have a way to move that logic out if it becomes a problem later.
3. Reflective population of form beans, no mechanism for describing how to create a form in a valid state.
Bad idea. No compile-time checking, nothing resembling pre-condition declarations, and consequently code that is very sloppy and difficult to test (how many possible states does a form bean have?). Also, potentially insecure, particularly when a Form bean is used for only some of its attributes by an Action. What happens if someone builds a "hostile" http request?
I'm not sure what you mean here:
What would you test at compile-time that isn't already, and how?
The taglibs help you create a HTML form that will populate a form bean. There's some redundancy, yes, but I have no idea how you'd go about getting rid of it.
What sort of hostile HTTP request? It's up to the application to not trust the data, whether through the validator or other means.
4. XML config.
I could never understand this. What's the value of defining the action forwards and dyna action forms in another language (ie the config XML) that is not programmatically accessible from the Java code? Its not like you can change struts config without changing the corresponding Java.
So you'd just have a method somewhere that builds an object structure? Interesting. That would save them some work parsing. But I don't know that it'd save me any work as an application developer.
(Short summary of Model 2 architecture: A "front controller" servlet which dispatches to JSPs based on state. Preferrably via a template that does includes for the selected content. All JSPs are "hidden" under WEB-INF to prohibit direct access from the outside.
How is struts not that? I tend to use it as something that does just what you've described, plus the validator bit for the HTML forms. There may be additional parts of it that do other things, but they're clearly not necessary because I'm not using them.
Could you give me a specific example of another Model 2 architecture and how it is simpler than struts?
But what kind of real-world Struts stuff have you done, instead of just FOSS messageboards that you put together in your spare time? When you're dealing with real-world constraints like time, money, and requirements from non-technical users, Struts works against you at every turn.
Never used struts at work. But it sounds like what you're really saying is that struts forces you to design a little, rather than just pumping out X lines of code/hour to meet a deadline. A lot of people get forced into pumping out code at work, and I don't think it leads to anything good, regardless of the tools you use. I'm lucky enough to have a boss that stands behind me when I think I need to spend a bit more time doing something the right way. Given that, I'd feel confident about using struts in commercially.
"Struts is such a big over-engineered pile of shit."
Compared to what? Pure JSP? Maybe if you have like two pages total, but if you have any more than that you'll discover that:
You've got huge chunks of Java code in your JSP that make little sense there. You've got two conceptually separate things there - the actions your code is taking and how it's presented. JSP makes sense for the presentation, but not for the real work.
You're either making a lot of redundant pages or redirecting back and forth in weird ways.
You're having to do a lot of work to keep passing users' data back to them in a HTML form when you have a validation error. I.e., when the user fills out a huge form and has an error halfway through. Most of the values need to be defaulted to their previous ones.
If you set out to solve these problems, you'll inevitably end up at struts. It may do other things (don't know; I haven't ventured in that deeply), but it does these in about as simple a way as anyone could.
I challenge you to find any significant amount of redundant code in a project of mine that uses struts: mb. Description here, browse the code here. There's not a lot of code there, and struts is largely responsible.
Internally, struts may be hugely overengineered...but I, as a user, don't care. It helps me keep my applications more terse and well-organized. (Much more maintainable than what I wrote before.)
Still PostgreSQL is much more compliant than MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server. Well-written ISO SQL code will usually work just OK on PostgreSQL, and PostgreSQL code will usually work just OK on, say, DB2 or Interbase. MySQL, SQL Server or Oracle code has to be extensively reworked, and even Emacs' replace-regexp can't always avoid manual intervention.
Have you seen Oracle 9i? It's much better than its predecessors. It accepts SQL-92 joins. (The weird (+) outer joins are deprecated.) coalesce (nvl is deprecated). They've had case since 8i (decode is deprecated). Lots of other standards-compliant goodies. So if you're writing for 9i, you should be able to exchange SQL with other databases fairly easily.
Of course, Oracle 9i still accepts the older syntax. So it's possible to write queries for it that are very nonstandard. And you're likely to see them for a while yet - it takes time for people to phase out old databases and change their habits.
SQL is a language, defined by ISO. MySQL is not SQL-compliant. Not even Oracle is. IBM DB2, PostgreSQL are SQL compliant, and a lot better than MySQL too. PostgreSQL is even faster and simpler.
PostgreSQL is not SQL compliant, either. It's much closer than MySQL, but it's not compliant. There's a few deviations here: PostgreSQL Gotchas. In addition to those, the quoting of SQL literals and identifiers is non-standard. It accepts \ as an escape character. (Try feeding \' to code that quotes it for PostgreSQL/MySQL and then feeds it to a database that quotes in the standard way. Or vice versa. It will break.)
To the best of my knowledge, there are no databases fully compliant to the SQL standard. But several are close enough under most circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not know that, but I'm not too surprised. (How efficient are our reactors, by the way? I.e., how much energy capacity do those uranium reserves represent?)
I was actually thinking of fusion with that statement. A man's gotta dream. :) We will not run out of deuterium any time soon. And though we've had little success with fusion before, I think it's only a matter of time.
That's thermodynamics. It's true for any fuel. It's even true for oil and nuclear energy - the difference being only that the energy wasn't put in during our lifetime. (And in the case of nuclear, that the pre-existing energy is all but inexhaustible.)
I just coded some IA-64 assembly and from what I've seen, this comment is dead-on. They've got a lot of interesting features:
If you just have a simple sequence of operations, each dependant on the one before, you can't really take advantage of these capabilities. (My code was like this. Even though performance wasn't my reason for writing assembly, it was a little disappointing that I couldn't play with the new toys.) If you're expecting these features to make Word start faster, you'll probably be disappointed.
But if you're doing intensive computations in a tight loop, you can do amazing things. If you can get all the execution units working simultaneously, it will fly. And the features like rotating registers are designed to make that possible. You need a very good compiler or a very smart person to hand-tune it. You may need to recompile to tune if your memory latency changes (affecting how many iterations to run at once) or they come out with a new chip with more sets of execution units. But in a situation like this, none of that is a problem. They'll have applications designed to run as fast as possible on this machine. They may never be run anywhere else.
No, this is what he is proposing. Maybe they already are installed in other places, but not where he is.
Dude, read the post.
First, this guy works with a Search and Rescue team. He doesn't need you telling him what hikers should do before setting out.
Second, "should typically"? The people who they're likely to be searching for are the people least likely to do what they should do.
Third, his goal is to know something more than if someone is missing. He wants to know where. That's why he suggested adding these sensors at critical trail junctions.
And by the way...
I do not think arcane means what you think it means.
Right, so any pie chart about this information is broken. Make the graph fit the subject, not the other way.
Well, almost any. I suppose you could put in OS use as a percentage of a person's computer time. And then aggregate across people, either equally or weighted by total time spent in front of a computer. But even then, I'm frequently using two computers at the same time (through ssh). Which do I count? Both? Do I divide the time by two then, or are we back to adding up to more than 100%?
Ok, RAM chips are probably a bit of a special case. Since manufacturers want to group them into bytes it makes sense to use the same units. And it's not usually something that the general public come across, so I guess it's ok.
It's not the only such place. It's just the first one I thought of.
Here's one going the other way (using powers of two with bytes). SCSI transfer rates are typically given in MBps. They mean 8 or 16 bytes per clock at N MHz. Since we've already established MHz means powers of 10, that means the MBps here is in powers of 10 also.
Your rule is nice and simple, but also wrong.
Consider RAM capacity (which I forgot to put in the quiz). If you look on an individual chip of a DIMM, you'll frequently see the capacity written in Mb. That means 2^20 bits. (It might also be a little higher than you'd expect; they might include the ECC bits in that count. I don't remember for sure.)
The hard drive manufacturers want to use base-10 units so that their drives sound larger than they really are. Everywhere else, base-2 units are used for measurements of bytes (including your file browser).
If you ever happen upon a really old Windows system, look more closely. IIRC there was at least one place that said MB and meant powers of 10. It's "obviously" a bug (and long since corrected), but I can easily see how it happened.
Another quiz item I forgot: floppy disks. A "floppy megabyte" (as in 1.44 MB) is 1000 * 1024 bytes.
Forgive me for posting a serious reply to a joke, but:
There's no paradox. Not only is there room for more than one significant OS (say 60% Windows, 40% Linux), but OS use is not mutually exclusive. That is, it could be 80% Windows, 30% OS X, 20% Linux. Any pie chart that shows OS use adding up to 100% is either oversimplified ("primary"? what does that mean?) or wrong.
Foe-listed for being so closed-minded that you won't even consider listening to people who have ever spoken an opposing view. Worse yet - being proud of it. (Moderators - +4? You should be ashamed of yourselves.)
By the way, please add me to your foe list. I consider those 99 people to be good company.
Because their motivations aside (profit, of course), the units make much more sense as they use them. The old computer science terms are inappropriate and grow more inappropriate every day, considering that the boundary between computer science and other things has been blurred for a long time and will only become more so.
At least the hard drive manufacturers have a little asterick next to every size they report and a footnote that states their meaning plainly.
Pop quiz: which definition applies to the following situations?
Twirlip of the Mists responded: Barbers did these things whenever doctors (and dentists!) were not available. That goes up to the early part of the 20th century, and even as late as the 19-teens in some rural parts of America and Europe.
Source? You've just repeated what you've said before, and I'm no more likely to believe it this time.
What you've said seems accurate...except the dates. My impression was that barbers did these things until the 16th century or so. Do you have any source for the idea that barbers were still performing surgery until the 1900s? Wikipedia, for what it's worth, says here that they did so in medieval times and earlier. (I.e., until the 15th century or so.)
In my experience, high school teachers are more motivated. It makes sense when you think about why they're there. For a high school teacher, it's not the research, and it's certainly not the money. Professors are better-paid and often teaching is secondary to their other duties.
You're definitely right overall; high school is a better place to learn calculus.
They're definitely necessary for proper digestion. When I take antibiotics, I also eat yogurt every day - the bacteria they use to culture it are the same as the bacteria you're supposed to have in your digestive system. They should come back naturally, but eating yogurt will speed things up and save you from some misery.
And since I mentioned antibiotics - other important things to know about them:
On a related note, do you know if there's any truth to the idea that a too-clean environment can cause our overactive immune systems to develop allergies? (I.e., should I blame mom?)
Email is mostly reliable in the sense that if the message fails to deliver, you should eventually get a bounce telling you why. Those links were complaining about:
The grandparent was talking about the search engine having 1-2% losses. In email, this would be messages silently dropped, not a bounce. People wouldn't stand for that kind of reliability problems. Either gmail is more reliable than this (and thus, their distributed system can be reliable when it needs to be) or a lot of people will be complaining about gmail soon.
To summarize: I won't disagree with you that email is not reliable enough for certain applications, but it's certainly more reliable than they said the search engine is. Thus, their implementing an email system on the same distributed system indicates to me that the distributed system is reliable.
> Speed of time? Excuse me, but can I get some of what you're smoking? How would you define a concept like that?
You're right; "speed of time" is nonsense.
Maybe he's trying to say is that object's world line would become space-like rather than time-like. (Which is true.) Mathematical definition here. Some information about the consequences here. (Not much, though. But I'm too tired to find a better link and much too tired to think independently.)
Sure, but isn't gmail running on the same distributed system? So they must be able to do things without loss. Unless it eats people's email?
I've read that this was due to performance, but that seems rather silly. If instantiating a form bean and populating it via reflection is acceptable, why is creating an instance of an Action a problem?
Let me ask that the other way: what benefit would there be to a different structure? I have not heard those performance arguments (and they do sound suspect), but I don't see any reason to change.
2. Decoupling Actions and Form beans.
Frankly, the seperation of Action (behavior) and Form (data) seems anti-OO.
Well, the important thing about the form is that it's a self-contained entity that knows how it is validated. That's a very OO concept and is useful when you have forms shared between actions. In my case, I don't have any shared forms, so I use DynaActionForms and validate them from the Actions. But it's nice to know I have a way to move that logic out if it becomes a problem later.
3. Reflective population of form beans, no mechanism for describing how to create a form in a valid state.
Bad idea. No compile-time checking, nothing resembling pre-condition declarations, and consequently code that is very sloppy and difficult to test (how many possible states does a form bean have?). Also, potentially insecure, particularly when a Form bean is used for only some of its attributes by an Action. What happens if someone builds a "hostile" http request?
I'm not sure what you mean here:
4. XML config.
I could never understand this. What's the value of defining the action forwards and dyna action forms in another language (ie the config XML) that is not programmatically accessible from the Java code? Its not like you can change struts config without changing the corresponding Java.
So you'd just have a method somewhere that builds an object structure? Interesting. That would save them some work parsing. But I don't know that it'd save me any work as an application developer.
How is struts not that? I tend to use it as something that does just what you've described, plus the validator bit for the HTML forms. There may be additional parts of it that do other things, but they're clearly not necessary because I'm not using them.
Could you give me a specific example of another Model 2 architecture and how it is simpler than struts?
Thank you. :)
But what kind of real-world Struts stuff have you done, instead of just FOSS messageboards that you put together in your spare time? When you're dealing with real-world constraints like time, money, and requirements from non-technical users, Struts works against you at every turn.
Never used struts at work. But it sounds like what you're really saying is that struts forces you to design a little, rather than just pumping out X lines of code/hour to meet a deadline. A lot of people get forced into pumping out code at work, and I don't think it leads to anything good, regardless of the tools you use. I'm lucky enough to have a boss that stands behind me when I think I need to spend a bit more time doing something the right way. Given that, I'd feel confident about using struts in commercially.
Compared to what? Pure JSP? Maybe if you have like two pages total, but if you have any more than that you'll discover that:
If you set out to solve these problems, you'll inevitably end up at struts. It may do other things (don't know; I haven't ventured in that deeply), but it does these in about as simple a way as anyone could.
I challenge you to find any significant amount of redundant code in a project of mine that uses struts: mb. Description here, browse the code here. There's not a lot of code there, and struts is largely responsible.
Internally, struts may be hugely overengineered...but I, as a user, don't care. It helps me keep my applications more terse and well-organized. (Much more maintainable than what I wrote before.)
Have you seen Oracle 9i? It's much better than its predecessors. It accepts SQL-92 joins. (The weird (+) outer joins are deprecated.) coalesce (nvl is deprecated). They've had case since 8i (decode is deprecated). Lots of other standards-compliant goodies. So if you're writing for 9i, you should be able to exchange SQL with other databases fairly easily.
Of course, Oracle 9i still accepts the older syntax. So it's possible to write queries for it that are very nonstandard. And you're likely to see them for a while yet - it takes time for people to phase out old databases and change their habits.
PostgreSQL is not SQL compliant, either. It's much closer than MySQL, but it's not compliant. There's a few deviations here: PostgreSQL Gotchas. In addition to those, the quoting of SQL literals and identifiers is non-standard. It accepts \ as an escape character. (Try feeding \' to code that quotes it for PostgreSQL/MySQL and then feeds it to a database that quotes in the standard way. Or vice versa. It will break.)
To the best of my knowledge, there are no databases fully compliant to the SQL standard. But several are close enough under most circumstances.