Flashes of Panic

In my first web-geek job, I had a really bad experience with Java on the web. Specifically, I wound up trying to run a site with a message board package which depended on what was, at the time, a profoundly awful Java web server. (It was gruesomely slow and crashed at an alarming rate.) I was left with the impression that Java was too slow, too unstable, and too complicated for the web. (Applets included, and I actually still hold that opinion.)

In my next job, I liked working with LAMP, which was powerful enough for what I needed to do, easy to install on my server, and thanks to a few lucky guesses when I built the server, pretty darn snappy. I got pretty comfortable with that. Meanwhile, the enterprise web application world, still infatuated with the “Java” buzzword, was playing around with a few packages I knew only by name: Tomcat, JSP, and Maven, just to name a few. Tomcat, as it happens, is the stable model for mediating between Java applications and the web. JSP… well, JSP goes “inside” Tomcat. Maven calls itself a “project management and comprehension tool,” which I find a bit whimsical.

And there are now some pretty powerful applications built on Tomcat and the associated Java technologies, particularly that Sakai package I’ve mentioned. I’ve reached the point where I really need to figure out what’s going on in here—not least because I need to learn more about what’s going on inside Sakai, whether we can improve it (MPOW is moderately interested in making contributions to the Sakai code-base, and significantly interested in being able to bend our own installation to our wishes,) and whether I can integrate other tools (specifically, blojsom, the only weblog engine I’ve found in Java. Which you’d think would tell you something about Java and the web, but never mind. It is, after all, shipping with OS X Server.)

I’m still not convinced that writing web apps in Java is a good idea in general, but the fact is, I need to know how it’s done. So I’ve spent some time installing Tomcat here on my Powerbook. Sakai and blojsom come next.

Now Playing: Clean Up Kid from Songs From The Other Side by The Charlatans