November 01, 2002

Rewind last few Java entries

Open Source Diversity - Andres expanded his point a little more. I still disagree – if we had five application frameworks in five years, that tells me there are five domains distinct and robust enough to maintain and enhance separate frameworks. I like the comparison with marriage, though :-) (BTW: Niel has a comment on this as well. Nice site.)

For my plate of crow: due to Cedric's gentle nudging regarding editors I've tried out the early access release of IDEA. I think I'm in love. This IDE is amazing -- the usability is great (including emacs keybindings), and every time I've wondered about a particular feature I'm delighted to find it already in there. The only things I miss are the magic emacs tab and being able to have longer keymapping combinations. (Ctrl-C Ctrl-V Ctrl-(C|B|R) is still hardwired into my fingers...) This may become a permanent part of my toolbox. I'm not even that concerned about the additional time it's eating up :-)

I also tried Eclipse but with very different results. I don't know if I've configured something wrong or what, but I'm hopelessly confused trying to configure a project and the some of the language they use to describe things -- "Perspective", "View" -- is ambiguous at best. This seems like a tool where I need someone who knows it sitting over my shoulder for an hour while I get my feet wet. I don't have any such person handy.

And finally, now that I've been actually using JSP for a bit I have to agree with Niel: JSP is not evil. It has the potential for evil, but so does any templating system that allows code. (Even the Template Toolkit allows this.) All it takes is discipline, which is exactly what I tell people who say that Perl is unmaintainable :-)

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