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

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Posted by Rob Wright on

I concur with the many other posts that specify that with the current objective of the paper, the best comparison is between AOLServer/TCL and J2EE/Java.

However, if the paper's objective is for the OpenACS community to respond to questions about a Java port/solution, then I think that question is best answered by a paper that argues that for OpenACS, there is no technical advantage in switching from AOLServer/TCL to J2EE/Java. I think that can be easily shown by first enumerating the advertised advantages of J2EE, and then responding with an equivalent AOLServer/TCL(/RDBMS?) feature. Throughout Ben's paper are reasons why not to switch, but these reasons are mixed with criticism of Java in web application development.

I would then follow the first paper with Ben's original statement that "Java and the J2EE platform are not ideal for web application development." This paper would specifically address limitations of Java in web development, and then, if appropriate, present the advantages of an AOLServer/TCL solution. Also, in this paper it is important to include a quantitative evalutation of the performance of Java to avoid discussion of statements such as "sometimes increasing the number of database interactions by a factor of 10 or 20."

And finally, a third paper could be written on the business advantages/disadvantages of J2EE/Java or AOLServer/TCL...if someone has the energy.

that's my two cents...