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Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#71

Post by sqrt17 »

Actually, you can code very nice lightweight apps using an embedded servlet container like Jetty, a JSP library, and an ORM (MyBatis or Hibernate). Which is kind of like the idea of a microframework.

I've used it for a demo I've made (some NLP stuff in Java that needed a web frontend, but where running it under Tomcat would have been like the tail wagging the dog) and it worked quite well.

I guess that all the people who want a microframework to get small things done efficiently have moved away from Java at this point, appalled by the whole J2EE circus. And once you have something as elaborate as the J2EE stack as it's meant to be, JSPs are not a good fit, because they don't enforce a separation between presentation and business logic.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#74

Post by drivebyacct2 »

10ren wrote: post #17

My opinion. It's partly because teams who do webapps tend to be small, young and agile. First, prejudices: they prefer new things (Java is old); they dislike the environment that is Java's home (big enterprise) and the practices and personalities types that go with it (perfectionistic, professional, conservative). Second, real reasons: Java is verbose and statically typed, and therefore it takes more work to make cha…

What sort of easy changes are people making that verbosity and static typing would prevent? I get the heebiejeebies trying to imagine that...

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#75

Post by drivebyacct2 »

jbail wrote: post #47
arete wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I started working on a new project using Tapestry 5.1 in GlassFish 3. That particular combination requires replacing GF's StAX lib with a different implementation that Tapestry depends on. Then there's the usual issue of reconciling the 2-3 different logging frameworks that various components depend on, writing the (albeit minimal XML descriptors for the app, web app, EJB, configuring resources in the app se…

Do you like Tapestry?

For what it's worth I had a nightmare of a time with it. Especially Tapestry 5.0, 5.1. The documentation is atrocious and out of date. Also, it could have been a novice mistake that resulted from days of all nighters in a row, but I had a critical bug that prevented me from delivering that, as a TA later discovered, was resulting from my form validation occurring once for each form element on the page rather than executing once for the entire form.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#76

Post by mindcrime »

rryyan wrote: post #58

I think Java and its plethora of frameworks makes new developers feel overwhelmed. Python clearly has Django, Ruby clearly has Rails, Java has... what? Struts? Spring? Tiles? Servlets? JSPs? Tag libraries? Where do you start? To an outsider, it feels like there is a mountain of material to wade through before you can really get going with a Java webapp; for Python and Ruby, the perceived barrier to entry is much lowe…

> Python clearly has Django,

To be fair, the picture on Python isn't totally clear either. You can choose from Django, Pylons (my preference, btw), Turbogears and possibly others... and you have the choice between SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM, etc. Picking Python definitely does not alleviate the need to make some evaluations and decisions.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#77

Post by ollysb »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #75
jbail wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you like Tapestry?

For what it's worth I had a nightmare of a time with it. Especially Tapestry 5.0, 5.1. The documentation is atrocious and out of date. Also, it could have been a novice mistake that resulted from days of all nighters in a row, but I had a critical bug that prevented me from delivering that, as a TA later discovered, was resulting from my form validation occurring once for each form element on the page rather than exe…

I've just moved over to rails. After 6 years of using poor APIs tapestry 5 was what finally tipped me over the edge. On the project we used it for we would actually allow 2 days to get a tapestry page working correctly. Howard (creator of tapestry) seems to believe that html and http were a mistake and that he's created the event based solution to hide it away. The result, helped along by the lack of docs, is that even with what would have been the simplest of tasks with html and http become an impossible hunt through his dodgy codebase. Far and away the most painful framework I've ever had the misfortune to use. Worst part was that is was me that was seduced by the seeming simplicity of it and chose it in the first place ;)

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#78

Post by garyrichardson »

ww520 wrote: post #57
garyrichardson wrote: post #4

On the low end, I've always thought java has a significant disadvantage: memory footprint. In particular, this is compared to PHP/Perl/RoR/etc. When you start your java app you pre-allocate all the memory you're going to need for the process' lifetime. This could be 512MB, this could be 2GB+, but it's never small. And this is unaffected by your initial traffic volume. It's the same for 0.001 hits/sec or 5 hits/sec. O…

I have run websites done in Java running on Tomcat plus MySQL plus Wine/Win32 programs and a few other services with 128M Linux servers. Tomcat takes up about 30M to 40M. The 512MB or 2GB are simply misinformation.

Original poster asked about enterprise webapps. Those that I've used are quite huge.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#79

Post by thenduks »

idleworx wrote: post #63
thenduks wrote: post #46

A few major reasons: - The verbosity of Java wears on me very quickly. - I can't stand working in an IDE. - Documentation is abysmal. - I'm not familiar with the ecosystem (so I don't know what to use and when -- What's 'Struts'? What's 'Tiles'?) and there doesn't seem to be a place to learn.

- I can't stand working in an IDE. Are you saying this because you mostly work with smaller web apps, or other reasons? For larger projects I find IDE's (especially Eclipse for JAVA indispensable).

I work mostly on large web apps but that doesn't have much to do with my dislike for IDE's.

The reason I don't like them is that I don't want 90% of what it gives me. My 'IDE' is 1 gvim per project and a terminal app with a couple tabs. I can't think of anything an IDE gives me that I don't a) want or b) already have.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few apps being built with JSP?

#80

Post by etherael »

iamelgringo wrote: post #20

For me, it's purely emotional. My last class at Uni 2 years ago was a survey of web dev technologies. We built sites using ASP.NET, Perl, PHP and JSP. Java and asp.net were tied for worst experience ever. Setup and configuration of the Java stack was 2/3rds of the project. And, that's after taking 2 years of Java in school. Setting up a Java stack on a Ubuntu or a Windows box was equally as painful for me at the time…

java stack in ubuntu can be installed mostly via apt-get, ie jdk + netbeans. I guess it depends on which particular jvm framework you're talking about on top of that as to how dicey it gets but for grails it's as simple as installing groovy, grails and the netbeans plugin for dev.

I've had no more issues with configuring a grails stack than configuring a rails or django stack, are you referring to some other kind of java framework here?

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