Thursday, January 25, 2007
Could we incite a server pages war?
I've taken a break from completing features in etc3 to get a Web version going. Keeping the two user interfaces in synch now means a lot less work later. Also, I've been getting requests for access to the monster and a Web version is the easiest way to do that.
But this guy is Java, suggesting Java Server Pages as a processing mechanism and I don't (didn't) know a thing about it. My Web work has been primarily in ASP and ASP.NET. So JSP is another thing to learn.
And learning new enabling technologies always invites questions about the relative quality and utility of what we've worked with before. What's interesting to me about JSP is less what it does than how much it looks like ASP. Of course JSP came first, which means Microsoft stole the approach from Sun. (Before going off, remember TS Eliot's observation that bad poets borrow, good poets steal.)
But JSP has little resemblance to the newer ASP.NET. Where JSP and ASP allow the mingling of program code (VB or Java) with html, ASP.NET completely separates them. Each aspx form file has a "code-behind" file that really is pure program code, making getting to an MVC pattern really easy. Moreover ASP.NET 2005 utilizes an xcopy deployment strategy. Whereas the first version of ASP.NET required you to precompile your code-behind files into binaries and install those, the current version has you deploying the code-behind files. When IIS passes them off to ASP.NET, ASP.NET checks to see if the source file it's working with has been modified since the last browser request for it. If so, it compiles the file and merges that binary into a single application binary. Very easy. Very dependable.
What would be pretty cool would be for Sun to steal back from MS some of what's good about ASP.NET and make a "better" JSP, forcing MS to make a "better" ASP forcing Sun to make a "better" JSP forcing MS to....
Competition sires quality. But Sun has to keep doing its part.
# posted by Jim @ 2:34 PM 
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You should have a look at the Google Web Toolkit. I've considered using it myself to whip up some web front ends for java apps. It's a bit odd to work with as it does a lot of code generation underneath, but it looks quite nice. Thinking about using JSP gives me the shivers...
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
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http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
# posted by 
: 11:55 PM
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