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

Collapse
Posted by Ben Adida on
Thanks for the comments. Please continue to submit more! I will put up a new draft based on these comments within a few days, and announce it on this thread. In the meantime, here are some answers to the comments:
  • Carl & others: you're right that I'm not clearly differentiating Tcl the language and AOLserver/Tcl the platform. I will improve this in my next draft. I'm making a statement about the platform much more than about the language.
  • Walter & Talli: I think the issue you're seeing is that I'm straying from my main goal. My attempt here is to speak about the J2EE platform solely within the confines of the OpenACS approach. This is not so much a paper for convincing J2EE people to move to OpenACS. Rather, it is a paper to explain why, where ArsDigita is moving to Java, we're not. I will attempt to make this clearer. However, both of your comments indicate that there is *also* a need for a paper on comparing the J2EE and AOLserver/Tcl platforms more directly, with no initial platform bias. This is *much* more difficult. I'll see if I can make some initial headway in that direction, and am happy to hear others' opinion on that topic, too!
  • Rafael: Yes, this is purely a technical paper for now (thus the title). The business approach is totally different, and I don't intend to batch the two audiences. I am also working on a business-oriented paper, but that's taking a bit longer given that I'm still in the process of observing the way many companies make this Java vs. Other decision.
  • Tom & Kevin: You're right, I need to make my comparisons clearer. The point is to compare development platforms, not languages. I will refine this.
  • Todd: I wrote a paper in late 1999 about how Java is simply inappropriate for web development, mostly based on the strong typing issue you mention and the OO vs. RDBMS issue. So I agree with you. However, I'm looking ahead a bit to the world of XML web services, where the strong typing argument actually plays somewhat in the favor of a strongly-typed language (although you still have to match Java types and XML types). That's why I chose to omit this argument in this particular paper, although I completely embraced it back in 1999. What do you think?
  • Kevin: Please note that your message accuses me of dishonesty and naivete. Your approach is hardly a cooperative way to enter the conversation: you may want to consider how this type of message contributes to the wariness of OpenACS members towards ArsDigita opinions and comments. We'd appreciate somewhat less condescending statements. That said, I'm happy to entertain the possibility that I am completely naive and that I need to see the light. Please help me do so by * explaining* what I'm clearly missing. Tell me how ACS 4.5/5.0 resolves the conflict between OO abstraction and ER datasets. For example, if I have a table of students and a table of professors, where each student has a "Thesis Advisor" reference to a professor, how do you query the data of "students and their advisors" in an OO setting? Do you do it with one SQL query? I'm genuinely interested in this problem. In fact, Philip (gasp! I mentioned his name!) and I discussed this issue 3 years ago: we settled on the idea that only Java + a real OODBMS would provide a better architecture than scripting + RDBMS. Finally, one strong point: please don't question my honesty unless you have serious evidence to back up that kind of statement. Everything I said in that paper is an honest comparison that attempts to rationally explain my intuitive unhappiness with Java on the web. I may be wrong, I may be missing some key brain cells, but I'm not dishonest.