I have to disagree. Sure if you're a novice, just banging together a few web pages there are more resources available on PHP4
Or if you're going to be writing the next Gallery/Wordpress/etc that will be installed on every concievable 2-bit hosting outfit you certainly need to keep PHP4 around for testing. (for reference MagpieRSS [mentioned in the review] required no changes to be compatible with PHP5)
However if you a programmer with some experience, or you're interested in building a well architected system, and especially if you believe that objects are an essential piece of good software development on medium to large projects you owe it to yourself to start using PHP5
Objects passed by references versus value is worth the upgrade all by itself.
While the idea of a 3 year old book on web development appeals to the poetry in my soul, I think it is misleading. In the last few years the Perl dev community has been making really significant progress in enabling rapid development methodologies, in particularly using tools like Class::DBI
A book which claims to detail how to do web development with Perl and MySQL and doesn't address the following issues is painfully out of date:
With the Perl Foundation funded work on Maypole being the most recent efforts in this direction.
grammar still not optional
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This meme has been kicking around blogland for a couple of days, and it definitely seems to be true. The only part of the above paragraph that was difficult to read was the sentence, "the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae".
Normally I would never post a comment about grammar, but it is kind of startling that in a block of text that jumbled the absence of 'the', and the swapping of 'is' for 'are' still jump out at you.
Anyone who followed the.Org bidding process knew this day was coming. ICANN's summary dismissal of the IMS/ISC bid as being too technical ("Internet is hard", says ICANN) in favor of 2-bit registrars who "white washed" their record by getting a major NGO to sit on the board made it inevitable.
Its too bad the Merc was too busy spreading the bad news to spread a little good news as well.
Alameda Country Computer Resource Center is an excellent program, about 30 minutes from the Mercury's office, recycles and reuses, and installs Linux on much of what passes through their doors, and ships what they can't use to a special facility in Canada where it is smelted for valuable ores. (and no it doesn't get dumped in Canada, they have stricter laws about that kind of thing then we do)
Also they only charge $10 for computer drop off not $30, and accept a number of items for free. They publish a schedule of fees on their website.
It was vCalendar, not V.Calendar. And in its current incarnation its called iCalendar. If you're going to be snide, get the information correct. iCalendar is the bedrock spec, for a whole suite of scheduling specs built on top of it, check out Calsch Working Group for more info.
People always talk about how wonderful PHP's online documentation is. Its okay, and the section at the end with the gazillion functions is certainly comprehensive (and reminds me why PHP is not my first choice of programming environments).
However, I thought this book was *much* more intelligently organized. The section titles made sense. A was followed by B was followed by C. It spoke about good practice and design.
If this is what most people learned to program PHP with there whould be significantly less horrid PHP in the world. I think this is actually a return to the Oreilly golden era, away from poorly concieved fluff books like Essential Blogging.
Now if they could come up with a PHP (or Python, or Java) cookbook as good as the Perl cookbook, we would know that the good days were here again.
Just a repackaging of what Rheingold himself wrote 2 weeks ago, Smart Mobs, with a few amusing if poorly documented anecdotes thrown in. The original is more interesting.
...it used to be that only government agencies and businesses had the resources and manpower to track personal information.
And this was somehow better? Better that people should realize that their lives are being catalogued and indexed, and sifted through then to believe simply because they don't have the power and resources, it isn't happening.
I really hope someday, very soon, one of the major credit checking companies get hacked, and those millions of profile pour out onto to the net (or FreeNet) and people will realize how much privacy they've already given away. And it will seem much more nefarious then someone reading your "Timmy the Turtle" story.
This is a great book!
on
Perl & XML
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can't believe "Perl & XML" is only get a 6, thats about an F- on the/. scale of book reviews.
Not much larger then a pamphlet, the book packs an amazing amount of info into its svelte form. It covers standards, tools, thought
process, programming tips, and history in an effortless, breezy tone. In the best tradition of Oreilly books (particularily the Perl ones) you can sit down and read the book cover to cover and enjoy it, or jump in here and there for quick reference.
The authors manage to stir clear the problem that plagues so many XML books, the endless reams of theory without application. E.g., who the hell deals with PIs on a regular basis when parsing XML? And yet every book drones on and on about them, but when the time comes to actually parse a little xml, the example will be a cop-out, the XML equivalent of "hello world", parse this simple, 1 level deep key-value pairs in XML.
Not so with "Perl & XML", the author cover the theory of XML, but are much more interested in getting you coding and producing then being pendantic. The w3c as already got the monopoly of pendantism anyways.
I particularily liked the walk through of XML::RSS late in the book, for an example of how to build something very much real world, and useful without being overly complicated.
And, at least for right now, the book is up-to-date, miracle of miracles, chronicling important new changes in the Perl XML parsing story. (like the new Perl SAX work being done)
Contrast Perl & XML with New Riders' "XML & PHP", which I almost abandoned in the first 20 pages, when they tried to tell me that expat was a compliant SAX parser. Expat is important, and confusing, and its understandable for the authors' to feel defensive about PHP's xml toolset, but the solution isn't to lie, nor be blithely ignorant. The book continues on from there, totally disorganized with no sense of building upon what you've just learned. Also, an entire chapter is dedicated to WDDX? Who uses WDDX? And the authors contribute yet another half-assed PHP RSS parser to the world; is it possible to get negative karma for sharing source?
The reviewer mentions:
Unfortunately, the discussion of where XML begins to distinguish itself from HTML, namely with DTDs, the new replacement for DTDs called schemas, and the transformation language XSLT, is too brief.
This seems to me to show a lack of understanding about much of the real work being done with XML. Its been my expirence that most XML parsing being done, particularily in a scripting environment, does not check against a DTD assuming one even exists. Plus covering DTDs, the proposed W3C Schemas, the increasingly popular challenger RELAX, plus Schematron, and others could easily have added another 100pgs to the book. And XSLT is a book unto itself (and in fact has an Oreilly book to itself).
The reviewer suggests that the XPath coverage is included for the purpose of "trite colloquialisms", and while, I'm not sure what that means, I think the fact that Perl has high quality tools supporting standards like XPath is awesome, and very gratifying. Without that sort of work being done, Perl simply wouldn't be a competive choice with Python and Java as an XML processing language.
And finally " it is by no means an authoritative text on Perl and XML,", there are good authoritative books on Perl (lots of them), and good authoritative books on XML (a handful), this book bridges the gap, does it nicely in my view, and I personally love the shortness, the focus, and the form factor.
Re:Only Trillian v0.7x affected?
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 1
So what your saying is, if someone, hypothetically, developed an IM system that allowed for server to be distributed, and removed almost all the burden from AOL onto the individual participants, then AOL would (and should) be fine with this? That they aren't motivated by a desire to own their users, control their mind space, and get general lock in.
Hell, lets get started developing this new amazing system right away, we'll be happy, AOL will be happy.
Lets call it....Jabber!
I imagine most of us would be very very happy to never have to go near an AOL server again, but we have comrades still stuck back there, and providing a bridge from free systems to proprietary is part of the migration process.
I mean, do you rail against antiword because it allows you to open MS word documents without seeing the.NET banner ads? (oh, wait, they don't do that yet. but its coming)
I just recently moved to using my vaio running linux as my only desktop computer. A CD drive is another $300.
Is there a way to play these CD based games legitimately, but without a CD drive?
I asked Loki but they ignored me:)
Thanks
kellan
Re:Assuming that Java has that firm of a market...
on
C# To Crush Java?
·
· Score: 1
Ha! Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
What a great line! I think I'll use it from now on:)
I can tell you from personal experience, having worked on a couple large projects in which Java was developed on Windows and deployed on Solaris, that it don't work like that for much beyond HelloWorld.class.
Then you were doing it wrong. I'm sure you feel better now. Having worked on several large project that were developed on windows, and deployed both to Solaris, and Linux. It worked quitely nicely thanks.
You're right, it wouldn't be trivial to make Gnutella talk to Freenet talk to Freehaven. However not being trivial does not mean it is a) not possible, or b) not worth doing.
In fact Brandon Wiley a Freenet developer has a really good article about this in the O'Reilly P2P book.
fm making money on ads?
on
Freshmeat II
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· Score: 1
no reason they should syndicate the freshmeat content around. it raises the brand both by exposures and pure cooooolness factor (ala ODP).
i don't believe for a second that fm makes much money off those silly open source banner ads.
the real money comes from the t-shirts, speaking engagements, and happy meal tie-ins.
kellan
Re:anyone have a gif of the old fm look?
on
Freshmeat II
·
· Score: 1
you know I was thinking this as well. It was a really nice layout, in fact I noticed as I surfed around the geekweb that freshmeat served two purposes.
Its stated purpose of listing the latest updates in open source software
Giving design challenged geeks some easy html to steal as they through together a last minute webpage for their new os project.
But this is the modern age of SemanticWeb! Perhaps if I can find, or recreate the old looks html, we could convince scoop to do rdf dumps of freshmeat that could be skinned to something more like what we've come to know and love.
what do you think?
kellan
some (hopefully) constructive criticism
on
Freshmeat II
·
· Score: 5
So I'm sort of disappointed with the level of criticism that Freshmeat.
I'm glad there are new features on Freshmeat, some of them sound exciting, (I
but i'm totally turned off by the new design, and here is why:
1. the whole page is a table (minus the ad of course) this is very very
noticeable slow, and unpleasant.
2. the blue bar on the left runs down the entire page, significantly
impacting the amount of space to display content. and yet it adds VERY
little to the page, just a few links, and a search box near the very top
of the page. this is very poor use of space.
3. the gray bar on the right is hard to read, not hard to read if i sit
there and look at it, but hard to read if i'm trying to skim a list of 100
newly added applications in 30 seconds, which is, in truth, what people
do.
4. information is not clearly divided. its hard to visually breakup the
new entries in the center column the yellow circle is supposed to help i
assume (as it doesn't add any other functionality and is repeated over and
over and over) and yet it also fails to convey any info. (its a
meaningless icon)
5. similar problems in the right hand bar, no clear separation of days,
if i'm scrolling down the page, Monday blurs into Sunday blurs into
Saturday.
6. Some people have pointed out the similarity with k5. K5's interface
is overwhelming, but I was willing to deal w/ that, adjust, spend the time
learning it, because there is an amazing amount of interaction going on at
k5. this is not the case w/ freshmeat. I know its fun to work on
community features, but I really don't see how they improve freshmeat all
that much. (Especially if they come at the expense of the old feature set
was immensely popular)
7. doing another quick once other or the site, i can't emphasize enough
how hard that center column is to use. what was wrong w/ the old
boxes? they were cool and usable! ditto in the actual project detail, all
the information because a jumbled mess. (and that damn meaningless icon
shows up again)
8. don't do it. do we need another community site? if you want to work on a community site, work on the bender code, or scoop, or squishdot. instant messaging in scoop would be an awesome addition, especially if it could optionally get logged somewhere like your
diary. that way we could take a lot of the more vitriol debates
"offline".
9. i'm going to take a leap of faith and assume that when i click on the totally uninformative "Step 2" button, I'll be brought to a page where I can preview this comment?
i've run into a trend several times lately (once in a personal conversation, once when reading about john ashcroft, and now this) that i thought had died out in mid-60s when McCarthy was made too look like such an idiot.
its called red-baiting, and its often used "this thing is like communism, and we all know how evil communism is" (or fascism, or whatever)
its dumb folks, the dumbest sort of strawman arguement in existence, and because its such a rotten example of a strawman, i think we should rename it the communism logical fallacy (or maybe just the name-calling logical fallacy)
either way, this guy is crackpot, is arguement are poor, stacked, rambling and often incoherent, and falsely didactic.
i can't begin to imagine how such a poorly written article made it to the front page of slashdot. honestly, no idea. none. really.
several people have said it, but just to echo them. nobody reccomends that you use JSP like PHP or ASP. you use it as a thin presentation layer or a rich logic engine, that communicates to your presentation layer using components. (beans in this case)
i think this is a very powerful model.
in fact its the same model that is trying to be accomplished with XSLT and Cocoon (for Java) or AxKit (for Perl)
however, XSLT is hard! its hard for developers to learn, its hard to debug, its hard to tune for performance. and it is very very very hard for your web designers to learn. I've done both, and I've tried to teach people both, and categorically (except for one brave soul) the designers who i showed XSLT plain out refused to work with it, while a few of them could be coaxed to do a simple if, and while in java.
i think style-sheets and projects like cocoon are going to start being really powerful in the next 6-18 months (especially combined with some of the really neat new xml technologies, like XPath, and Topic Maps) but for right now nobody really knows what they're doing, while JSP already has a set of reccomended (and documented) best practices.
kellan
ps. a true geek test. how do you pronounce the word "coax"?
i haven't read through the 21 odd comments blow my threshold so maybe somebody else has already mentioned "Web Deveopment with JavaServerPages" from Manning Press.
if not, let me mention it. this book only covers JSP, not java, not jdbc, not servlets, not somebody half baked propiertary servlet library.
this book is good! we just did a major (4 month) upgrade of our commerical website moving from an ASP site running on NT, to a JSP, Servlet, and Java middleware running on Solaris and Linux boxes. this required retraining for a huge swath of our technical infrastructure, not just developers, but qa, project managers, tech support etc.
this book was great for that. chapter 1 should be read by anybody involved with building web apps, its a theoretical overview of what web development, including what is and isn't possible, availabe technologies and how they relate, etc, etc.
the next several chapters give a good overview of jsp, and proper design methdology. i reccomend the people i work with on non-jsp (php, and perl w/ template toolkit) web apps read these chapters. if you want to understand deep down how the MVC design pattern relates to web development this is the best intro i've found.
its also the only book i found with a strong intro to tag libraries. (though this might have changed since june)
all in all "Web Development with JavaServerPages" changed the way I think about web development. and it, combined w/ the OO perl book by Damien Conway, made Manning my new favorite publisher of tech books.
come on chromatic, take off the kid gloves some day? i flipped through this book, as i have several recent oreilly offerings, and was unimpressed. felt incomplete, a little rushed, a little sloppy. (not as bad as some of the utter trash i've seem come from o'reilly lately like "Programming Web Graphics" which was insulting)
but every book that gets reviewed on slashdot get an 8 or a 9. use a scale of 1 to 3 if your spread is 3 points!
i'm not saying i've never found slashdot's reviews helpful, just optimistic. (and positive reviews of the two mysql books [o'reillys and new riders] tricked me into buying books significantly weaker then the online docs)
thanks
kellan
ps. if your getting sick of o'reilly, manning is has put out a number of truly quality offerings lately.
find out at r2kphilly.org about all 420 people facing prosecution in philly, the tactics the police used, what you can do to help, and find out what you can do to protect yourself in the future.
1.Why did he choose a nonjury trial? Of course a judge will take a cop's word over that of an "evil
hacker", unless there's good evidence to the contrary.
because the intial trials in philly are being help without juries. these are "sentencing" trials. basically intimidation tatics in order to get the majority of people to buckle and take a plea bargain.
it is only during the appeal that people are being allowed a jury.
what else do you expect from a city known for fire bombing its citzens?
Slashdot Mirror
mod this up, this is a tip a hacker can actually use.
I have to disagree. Sure if you're a novice, just banging together a few web pages there are more resources available on PHP4
Or if you're going to be writing the next Gallery/Wordpress/etc that will be installed on every concievable 2-bit hosting outfit you certainly need to keep PHP4 around for testing. (for reference MagpieRSS [mentioned in the review] required no changes to be compatible with PHP5)
However if you a programmer with some experience, or you're interested in building a well architected system, and especially if you believe that objects are an essential piece of good software development on medium to large projects you owe it to yourself to start using PHP5
Objects passed by references versus value is worth the upgrade all by itself.
While the idea of a 3 year old book on web development appeals to the poetry in my soul, I think it is misleading. In the last few years the Perl dev community has been making really significant progress in enabling rapid development methodologies, in particularly using tools like Class::DBI
A book which claims to detail how to do web development with Perl and MySQL and doesn't address the following issues is painfully out of date:
* Class::DBI
* SPOPS
* Kake's How to avoid writing code
With the Perl Foundation funded work on Maypole being the most recent efforts in this direction.
This meme has been kicking around blogland for a couple of days, and it definitely seems to be true. The only part of the above paragraph that was difficult to read was the sentence, "the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae".
Normally I would never post a comment about grammar, but it is kind of startling that in a block of text that jumbled the absence of 'the', and the swapping of 'is' for 'are' still jump out at you.
Anyone who followed the .Org bidding process knew this day was coming. ICANN's summary dismissal of the IMS/ISC bid as being too technical ("Internet is hard", says ICANN) in favor of 2-bit registrars who "white washed" their record by getting a major NGO to sit on the board made it inevitable.
Its too bad the Merc was too busy spreading the bad news to spread a little good news as well.
Alameda Country Computer Resource Center is an excellent program, about 30 minutes from the Mercury's office, recycles and reuses, and installs Linux on much of what passes through their doors, and ships what they can't use to a special facility in Canada where it is smelted for valuable ores. (and no it doesn't get dumped in Canada, they have stricter laws about that kind of thing then we do)
Also they only charge $10 for computer drop off not $30, and accept a number of items for free. They publish a schedule of fees on their website.
It was vCalendar, not V.Calendar. And in its current incarnation its called iCalendar. If you're going to be snide, get the information correct. iCalendar is the bedrock spec, for a whole suite of scheduling specs built on top of it, check out Calsch Working Group for more info.
People always talk about how wonderful PHP's online documentation is. Its okay, and the section at the end with the gazillion functions is certainly comprehensive (and reminds me why PHP is not my first choice of programming environments).
However, I thought this book was *much* more intelligently organized. The section titles made sense. A was followed by B was followed by C. It spoke about good practice and design.
If this is what most people learned to program PHP with there whould be significantly less horrid PHP in the world. I think this is actually a return to the Oreilly golden era, away from poorly concieved fluff books like Essential Blogging.
Now if they could come up with a PHP (or Python, or Java) cookbook as good as the Perl cookbook, we would know that the good days were here again.
Just a repackaging of what Rheingold himself wrote 2 weeks ago, Smart Mobs, with a few amusing if poorly documented anecdotes thrown in. The original is more interesting.
And this was somehow better? Better that people should realize that their lives are being catalogued and indexed, and sifted through then to believe simply because they don't have the power and resources, it isn't happening.
I really hope someday, very soon, one of the major credit checking companies get hacked, and those millions of profile pour out onto to the net (or FreeNet) and people will realize how much privacy they've already given away. And it will seem much more nefarious then someone reading your "Timmy the Turtle" story.
Not much larger then a pamphlet, the book packs an amazing amount of info into its svelte form. It covers standards, tools, thought process, programming tips, and history in an effortless, breezy tone. In the best tradition of Oreilly books (particularily the Perl ones) you can sit down and read the book cover to cover and enjoy it, or jump in here and there for quick reference.
The authors manage to stir clear the problem that plagues so many XML books, the endless reams of theory without application. E.g., who the hell deals with PIs on a regular basis when parsing XML? And yet every book drones on and on about them, but when the time comes to actually parse a little xml, the example will be a cop-out, the XML equivalent of "hello world", parse this simple, 1 level deep key-value pairs in XML.
Not so with "Perl & XML", the author cover the theory of XML, but are much more interested in getting you coding and producing then being pendantic. The w3c as already got the monopoly of pendantism anyways.
I particularily liked the walk through of XML::RSS late in the book, for an example of how to build something very much real world, and useful without being overly complicated.
And, at least for right now, the book is up-to-date, miracle of miracles, chronicling important new changes in the Perl XML parsing story. (like the new Perl SAX work being done)
Contrast Perl & XML with New Riders' "XML & PHP", which I almost abandoned in the first 20 pages, when they tried to tell me that expat was a compliant SAX parser. Expat is important, and confusing, and its understandable for the authors' to feel defensive about PHP's xml toolset, but the solution isn't to lie, nor be blithely ignorant. The book continues on from there, totally disorganized with no sense of building upon what you've just learned. Also, an entire chapter is dedicated to WDDX? Who uses WDDX? And the authors contribute yet another half-assed PHP RSS parser to the world; is it possible to get negative karma for sharing source?
The reviewer mentions:
This seems to me to show a lack of understanding about much of the real work being done with XML. Its been my expirence that most XML parsing being done, particularily in a scripting environment, does not check against a DTD assuming one even exists. Plus covering DTDs, the proposed W3C Schemas, the increasingly popular challenger RELAX, plus Schematron, and others could easily have added another 100pgs to the book. And XSLT is a book unto itself (and in fact has an Oreilly book to itself).The reviewer suggests that the XPath coverage is included for the purpose of "trite colloquialisms", and while, I'm not sure what that means, I think the fact that Perl has high quality tools supporting standards like XPath is awesome, and very gratifying. Without that sort of work being done, Perl simply wouldn't be a competive choice with Python and Java as an XML processing language.
And finally " it is by no means an authoritative text on Perl and XML,", there are good authoritative books on Perl (lots of them), and good authoritative books on XML (a handful), this book bridges the gap, does it nicely in my view, and I personally love the shortness, the focus, and the form factor.
So what your saying is, if someone, hypothetically, developed an IM system that allowed for server to be distributed, and removed almost all the burden from AOL onto the individual participants, then AOL would (and should) be fine with this? That they aren't motivated by a desire to own their users, control their mind space, and get general lock in.
.NET banner ads? (oh, wait, they don't do that yet. but its coming)
Hell, lets get started developing this new amazing system right away, we'll be happy, AOL will be happy.
Lets call it....Jabber!
I imagine most of us would be very very happy to never have to go near an AOL server again, but we have comrades still stuck back there, and providing a bridge from free systems to proprietary is part of the migration process.
I mean, do you rail against antiword because it allows you to open MS word documents without seeing the
kellan
A CD drive is another $300.
Is there a way to play these CD based games legitimately, but without a CD drive?
I asked Loki but they ignored me :)
Thanks kellan
You're right, it wouldn't be trivial to make Gnutella talk to Freenet talk to Freehaven. However not being trivial does not mean it is a) not possible, or b) not worth doing.
In fact Brandon Wiley a Freenet developer has a really good article about this in the O'Reilly P2P book.
i don't believe for a second that fm makes much money off those silly open source banner ads.
the real money comes from the t-shirts, speaking engagements, and happy meal tie-ins.
kellan
But this is the modern age of SemanticWeb! Perhaps if I can find, or recreate the old looks html, we could convince scoop to do rdf dumps of freshmeat that could be skinned to something more like what we've come to know and love.
what do you think?
kellan
1. the whole page is a table (minus the ad of course) this is very very noticeable slow, and unpleasant.
2. the blue bar on the left runs down the entire page, significantly impacting the amount of space to display content. and yet it adds VERY little to the page, just a few links, and a search box near the very top of the page. this is very poor use of space.
3. the gray bar on the right is hard to read, not hard to read if i sit there and look at it, but hard to read if i'm trying to skim a list of 100 newly added applications in 30 seconds, which is, in truth, what people do.
4. information is not clearly divided. its hard to visually breakup the new entries in the center column the yellow circle is supposed to help i assume (as it doesn't add any other functionality and is repeated over and over and over) and yet it also fails to convey any info. (its a meaningless icon)
5. similar problems in the right hand bar, no clear separation of days, if i'm scrolling down the page, Monday blurs into Sunday blurs into Saturday.
6. Some people have pointed out the similarity with k5. K5's interface is overwhelming, but I was willing to deal w/ that, adjust, spend the time learning it, because there is an amazing amount of interaction going on at k5. this is not the case w/ freshmeat. I know its fun to work on community features, but I really don't see how they improve freshmeat all that much. (Especially if they come at the expense of the old feature set was immensely popular)
7. doing another quick once other or the site, i can't emphasize enough how hard that center column is to use. what was wrong w/ the old boxes? they were cool and usable! ditto in the actual project detail, all the information because a jumbled mess. (and that damn meaningless icon shows up again)
8. don't do it. do we need another community site? if you want to work on a community site, work on the bender code, or scoop, or squishdot. instant messaging in scoop would be an awesome addition, especially if it could optionally get logged somewhere like your diary. that way we could take a lot of the more vitriol debates "offline".
9. i'm going to take a leap of faith and assume that when i click on the totally uninformative "Step 2" button, I'll be brought to a page where I can preview this comment?
thanks, kellan
its called red-baiting, and its often used "this thing is like communism, and we all know how evil communism is" (or fascism, or whatever)
its dumb folks, the dumbest sort of strawman arguement in existence, and because its such a rotten example of a strawman, i think we should rename it the communism logical fallacy (or maybe just the name-calling logical fallacy)
either way, this guy is crackpot, is arguement are poor, stacked, rambling and often incoherent, and falsely didactic.
i can't begin to imagine how such a poorly written article made it to the front page of slashdot. honestly, no idea. none. really.
kellan
i think this is a very powerful model.
in fact its the same model that is trying to be accomplished with XSLT and Cocoon (for Java) or AxKit (for Perl)
however, XSLT is hard! its hard for developers to learn, its hard to debug, its hard to tune for performance. and it is very very very hard for your web designers to learn. I've done both, and I've tried to teach people both, and categorically (except for one brave soul) the designers who i showed XSLT plain out refused to work with it, while a few of them could be coaxed to do a simple if, and while in java.
i think style-sheets and projects like cocoon are going to start being really powerful in the next 6-18 months (especially combined with some of the really neat new xml technologies, like XPath, and Topic Maps) but for right now nobody really knows what they're doing, while JSP already has a set of reccomended (and documented) best practices.
kellan
ps. a true geek test. how do you pronounce the word "coax"?
if not, let me mention it. this book only covers JSP, not java, not jdbc, not servlets, not somebody half baked propiertary servlet library.
this book is good! we just did a major (4 month) upgrade of our commerical website moving from an ASP site running on NT, to a JSP, Servlet, and Java middleware running on Solaris and Linux boxes. this required retraining for a huge swath of our technical infrastructure, not just developers, but qa, project managers, tech support etc.
this book was great for that. chapter 1 should be read by anybody involved with building web apps, its a theoretical overview of what web development, including what is and isn't possible, availabe technologies and how they relate, etc, etc.
the next several chapters give a good overview of jsp, and proper design methdology. i reccomend the people i work with on non-jsp (php, and perl w/ template toolkit) web apps read these chapters. if you want to understand deep down how the MVC design pattern relates to web development this is the best intro i've found.
its also the only book i found with a strong intro to tag libraries. (though this might have changed since june)
all in all "Web Development with JavaServerPages" changed the way I think about web development. and it, combined w/ the OO perl book by Damien Conway, made Manning my new favorite publisher of tech books.
kellan
This is true. Visors do not allow OS upgrades, the OS is burned into the rom.
kellan -- who masqurades as a palm employee
but every book that gets reviewed on slashdot get an 8 or a 9. use a scale of 1 to 3 if your spread is 3 points!
i'm not saying i've never found slashdot's reviews helpful, just optimistic. (and positive reviews of the two mysql books [o'reillys and new riders] tricked me into buying books significantly weaker then the online docs)
thanks kellan
ps. if your getting sick of o'reilly, manning is has put out a number of truly quality offerings lately.
find out at r2kphilly.org about all 420 people facing prosecution in philly, the tactics the police used, what you can do to help, and find out what you can do to protect yourself in the future.
kellan
because the intial trials in philly are being help without juries. these are "sentencing" trials. basically intimidation tatics in order to get the majority of people to buckle and take a plea bargain.
it is only during the appeal that people are being allowed a jury.
what else do you expect from a city known for fire bombing its citzens?
kellan