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by Thomas Gideon.
Original Post: Struts Waning
Feed Title: Command Line Interface
Feed URL: http://www.gideonfamily.org/roller/rss/cmdln?catname=Java
Feed Description: The blog of a programmer-hacktivist-curmudgeon who occasional rants about society, work, and technology, among other things. Now how do I get to a command prompt on this thing?
Got a referral to one of my posts complaining about BeanUtils. I took the opportunity to plug Navel and surf back into the original post, which had some old comments I hadn't read, including one by Jesse.
Sorry, Jesse, none of the reasons given for using the abortion that is BeanUtils are very compelling to me. Struts seems to be evolving into a no-brains implementation of a web framework, targeted at either the lowest common denominator or the laziest programmers out there. While this would be appropriate say for a scripting or templating engine, I don't think it is the right approach for software that in my experience is being used to build front ends for enterprise applications.
In fact, a lot of the Jakarta commons projects, and a vocal and annoying sub-community within the larger Java community, seem to want a dumbing down of Java. Yeah, Java has warts and sure it could be made a more powerful, succinct, sophisticated, whatever tool. But it's pretty darn good as it is, as far as I'm concerned. I'm more productive with Java than any other tool I've used professionally, which is saying something. I've said it before and I'll say it again--if you need something simpler, faster, whatever, then don't use Java. For crying out loud, people, the world is not full of nails and Java is not a hammer. Try Python, or Jython, or BeanShell--most pattern catalogs contain the Little Language pattern for a reason.
Anyway, I'm starting to think about writing a web framework to compete with Struts based on my real world experiences with Struts. There are many things I like about Struts, there are obviously things I dislike and there really is quite a bit missing that would be more useful to have than XML based beans and validation. Stay tuned--assuming I can get Navel to a 1.0 release, this would be my next project.
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