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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?

#51

Post by kp212 »

roam wrote: post #34
mrj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about all that?

See my reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535945

Whoa, no need for the stupid comments. I wouldn't suggest a full fledged app in JSPs, yes thats insane ;-). Although, years ago I wrote blog where I could email my blogs in and I remember that first night I didn't want to set up a war and just wrote a straight JSP...I was only looking and I didnt want to wait. Obviously that is not a long term solution. However, having something that's wrong is better than not having anything done. You do make a good point, I think I will play around with Django, sounds like its faster than compile, war, deploy that java apps take. How much productivity increase do you see over java in terms of development?

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

#52

Post by thenduks »

vijaydev wrote: post #49
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.

disagree on the documentation point.

Perhaps not the documentation of Java itself, but practically every third-party library I've ever tried to use has been a disaster. At least with Ruby or Python I can just dig into the source code, but with so many FactoryFactory's around...

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

#53

Post by kp212 »

tomh wrote: post #50
kp212 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that with a JSP page, and Tomcat. You can use JSP very much like a scripting language (no need to hit a servlet, controller, etc), but obviously it can get a little messy to manage depending how large of app you write.

One big problem; if you keep most of the Java code on the servlet side and you throw an exception, the stack trace will give you the line number of the offending code. OTOH, if you do all that heavy lifting in the JSP side, depending on your choice of server, you get a stack trace...either without a line number, or with a line number of the JSP which was compiled and turned into a Java program on the fly. And we all…

Yeah you are right, lets just forget using jsp without the framework model.

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

#54

Post by noodle »

i do java at work, and ruby/python/php at home. for me, its simple.

java and its frameworks are too bureaucratic. getting things done requires too much. in an enterprise environment with lots of developers, this is good. in an agile, rapid development type of environment with a small handful of people, this is bad.

the closest thing that i've come across that made me want to consider java apps development is grails.

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

#55

Post by mark_l_watson »

Although I use Rails for most web apps that I do now, there was a period from about 11 years ago to about 5 years ago that JSP was the sweet spot for me. I would put a lot of embedded Java in JSPs, and as an app matured, I migrated the code to custom tag libraries (easy to write once you have everything working in JSPs).

For me part of the lure of JSP apps was that I really liked Tomcat as a development and deployment platform. For apps that needed a lot of background processing, I started work threads in servlet init methods, and liked having everything in one JVM.

I had one app running without restart for several years until my customer's admins let the server run out of free disk space. I am not at all confident of a Rails app running for 3 to 4 years with no restarts.

To answer your question: I might still choose JSP for high volume web apps. For apps with a modest number of users, Rails makes more sense for me.

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

#56

Post by Tichy »

WALoeIII wrote: post #35
Tichy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I am afraid to host a RoR app on my server, which runs several Java apps. I think the server has only 256MB of RAM (it is old, but cheap), or maybe 512 - not a lot, in any case. I am much more worried about memory consumption of RoR. Never really launched it in production, but wasn't it the case that you have to load balance between several Mongrels, each consuming > 100MB of RAM? Java is just unpleasant to…

heroku.com

The "demo" version of heroku has only one process, I think, and 5MB storage. The first professional version is already quite expensive. I pay 10$/month for my server (split with a friend).

I host several projects on that one server (incubation...).

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

#57

Post by ww520 »

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.

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

#58

Post by rryyan »

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 lower.

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

#59

Post by ww520 »

Tichy wrote: post #5

Just to set up one of the Java frameworks you list is already a lot of work and a lot of wrangling of XML. Without frameworks, it is probably OK if you already have a working web.xml. I used to just copy my working web.xml and modify it. Good luck if you want to create a working web.xml from scratch, though. The specification for a proper web.xml is a PDF with several 100 pages (last time I looked, a couple of years…

So they have very good and thorough documentation. Why is that a problem? In my experience, setting up web.xml is a matter of copying the prepackaged one and change a few lines to specify settings about your app.

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

#60

Post by idleworx »

roam wrote: post #8

I prefer scripting languages over a pure Java stack simply because I can reload the page and see what's happening with the new code. Yes, you can use JRebel, hook up a debugger and tweak settings to get some hot code replacement, but they've always failed me at one point or another, resulting in hours of fun. The compile-check-fix-compile cycle gets under my skin, especially when you're using frameworks and libraries…

From my experience, I agree with you on Hibernate. MyBatis however turned out to be rather painless. I've also noticed that Play framework and looks really great, just haven't had the chance to play around with it much.
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