These past couple days, I have been grateful for the bit of dabbling I did last year with Java servlets and JSP. Grateful, because the project I've been working on decided it was time for me to get a curve ball, and next thing I know, I'm sitting in front of a nice big pile of web application that not only has servlets and jsp (among other things), but a healthy chunk of files that use the apache struts tag library.

Had I not taken the time to school myself all those months ago, and gain at least a rudimentary understanding of these things, it would be safe to say that I'd be in a much deeper world of "What the hell is all this?" right now. Not that I'm having to do much heavy lifting myself at this stage; just a few edits to get code that was written by somebody else to run in a new environment. Still, if I were starting out with no idea what a "WEB-INF" directory was for, what a deployment descriptor was, or the basics of getting Apache Tomcat setup, this would be taking several times as long as it is.

As it stands, I'm remembering why I only dabbled with it for a little while, rather than adopting it for some of my pet projects, as I had briefly thought about doing. As nice as some of the features sound, Java (or JSP, servlets, struts, or whatever) inevitably ends up taking 5 times as long to accomplish the same thing that could be done more easily and quickly in just about any other environment.

No matter which way you interpret it, the statement applies. Coding time. Software installation and configuration time. Processor time when it runs.

It's like a bunch of people got together and said, "Hey, let's make an architecture that's as complex and confusing to use as possible. Throw in some extra 'tiers' here and there, and call it a multi-teired architecture. Nevermind whether all these teirs actually serve any practical purpose, because multi-teared sounds neat and fancy." Thus was born J2EE, a bunch of random tag libraries, piles upon piles of xml for even the most minute key/value pair storage, and a whole lot of big thick books.

(I'm not even necessarily digging on the Java language itself, which is actually quite nice in a lot of ways. But some of the API's are just absolutely overboard, especially when compared to the relative simplicity of certain scripting languages, which accomplish the same thing as a big huge tree of Java "architecture" using a few short lines of code, and they run faster too.)

Even so, it's good to be at least somewhat knowledgable about such things, as this week is proving.

Now I think I shall wander off in the direction of bed.