Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to A Technical Paper on Java

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Posted by Kevin Scaldeferri on
I'll pose a few naysayer comments and questions, since no one else seems to want to.

This doc seems mostly to be arguing why you are happy with TCL and not inclined to go through the work involved to switch languages.  That's perfectly fine, but the article is posed as an argument about the inherent potential of the two languages.  So, I'd like to see a little more honesty about the real issue under consideration.

In a number of places, there are comparisons made between (Open)ACS and Java.  But, you're comparing apples and oranges.  The fair comparison is AOLServer/TCL vs. Java (& a servlet container) or ACS TCL vs. some Java application development framework.  The fact that the comparison you make isn't a complete slaughter is a tribute to the strength and extensiveness of the standard Java libraries.

I have a number of objections to the section on the conflict between abstraction (by which you seem to mean object-orientation) and RDBMSs.  Certainly the O-R mapping problem is hard, but I think your third paragraph about the number of database interactions and the inherent scalability is based on naive assumptions about how you approach this issue.