Ajax4Jsf White Paper



  • I'm just reading through the Ajax4Jsf white paper. The following paragraphs were on about the second page of text - it didn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence for me to continue reading (my emphasis added):

    "Let’s start with components. Developers have been talking about components for ages. It
    would seem absolutely obvious: you can construct a building from big blocks much faster
    than from small bricks – and a lot more cheaply. Moving from civil engineering to the IT
    industry, the same idea is behind the movement from Assembler language (or even pre-
    Assembler machine code back in prehistoric times, if anybody still remembers) towards
    high-level and then object-oriented languages.


    "If we look at the course of Web development from that point of view, the same movement
    is evident, from plain HTML (Assembler) to JSP (Fortran) to JavaServer Faces (Java for the
    Web). I put JavaServer Faces at the end of this evolutionary chain, because it is the latest and
    most advanced web components technology, at least on the Java side of the world."

    As far as I am aware, JSP stands for "JavaServer Pages" and was originally meant to be "Java for the Web". But, you know, maybe they're onto something - maybe those '.jspf' pages I see occasionally are not '.jsp fragments' but really stand for '.jsp in FORTRAN'!
     



  • I don't see the wtf...

    Sounds like they're making an analogy, as in:

    The evolution in web development: 

    HTML -> JSP -> JavaServer Faces

    is equivalent to this older evolution in programming:

    Assembly -> Fortran -> Java
     



  • [quote user="shadowman"]

    I don't see the wtf... Sounds like they're making an analogy, as in:

    The evolution in web development: 

    HTML -> JSP -> JavaServer Faces

    is equivalent to this older evolution in programming:

    Assembly -> Fortran -> Java
     

    [/quote]

     

    I concur



  • I think the WTF here is their equating of HTML to assembler, considering HTML is a very easy, static, and un-assembler-like "language", while assembler is a highly complex, powerful, and wild beast of a language.



  • I was noticing the same thing. HTML is static whereas the others are
    dynamic. If they want to illustrate evolution, perhaps they should've
    put CGI or Perl instead of HTML.



  • [quote user="nuclear_eclipse"]while assembler is a highly complex, powerful, and wild beast of a language.[/quote]

    Assembler is a highly simple, powerful beast of a language. That's kinda the point.
     



  • [quote user="AbbydonKrafts"]HTML is static whereas the others are dynamic.
    [/quote]

    The real WTF here is this statement. It sounds like it should make sense but in fact is gibberish. Have you been hanging around with the buzzword goons? It might as well say "HTML is purple whereas the others are chartreuse".
     



  • @asuffield said:

    [quote user="nuclear_eclipse"]while assembler is a highly complex, powerful, and wild beast of a language.

    Assembler is a highly simple, powerful beast of a language. That's kinda the point.
     

    [/quote]

    When you start to get into doing drivers, interrupts, functions/procedures, stacks, and memory allocations, I don't exactly see assembler as being simple. It's a very complex process of managing and planning your code to take all those points into account. If assembler was simple, we'd all just be coding in machine languages...



  • At first pass, I read the WTF the same way PhillS did.  Especially since I'd never heard of
    javaserver faces -- I similarly assumed that the WTF was claiming that JSP stood for JavaServer Faces.

    However, after a quick google for JavaServer Faces, and reading the explanation of the analogy, it seems the only WTF in the WTF is the fact that it's extremely poorly written.
     



  • [quote user="shadowman"]

    I don't see the wtf... Sounds like they're making an analogy, as in:

    The evolution in web development: 

    HTML -> JSP -> JavaServer Faces

    is equivalent to this older evolution in programming:

    Assembly -> Fortran -> Java
     

    [/quote]

    It's more like

    HTML -> JSP -> JavaServer Faces

    is equivalent to

    Assembly -> Java -> Java

     



  • [quote user="nuclear_eclipse"][quote user="asuffield"]

    Assembler is a highly simple, powerful beast of a language. That's kinda the point.
     

    [/quote]

    When you start to get into doing drivers, interrupts, functions/procedures, stacks, and memory allocations, I don't exactly see assembler as being simple.[/quote]

    Missed the point. Assembler is simple. Programs that need to be written in assembler frequently are not. And writing programs in assembler is certainly not simple. But by analogy - just because it's difficult to take over the world by hitting people with a rock, doesn't mean that it's difficult to hit somebody with a rock. Overly simple tools are not normally the best choice for excessively complicated tasks.



  • @asuffield said:

    [quote user="nuclear_eclipse"][quote user="asuffield"]

    Assembler is a highly simple, powerful beast of a language. That's kinda the point.
     

    When you start to get into doing drivers, interrupts, functions/procedures, stacks, and memory allocations, I don't exactly see assembler as being simple.[/quote]

    Missed the point. Assembler is simple. Programs that need to be written in assembler frequently are not. And writing programs in assembler is certainly not simple. But by analogy - just because it's difficult to take over the world by hitting people with a rock, doesn't mean that it's difficult to hit somebody with a rock. Overly simple tools are not normally the best choice for excessively complicated tasks.

    [/quote]

    I'll accept that; good analogy. Much better than HTML -> JSP -> JSF =\



  • Heh. The 'WTF' I was originally going for was the fact that they seemed to think that Java Server Pages were written in Fortran.

    But this is an interesting discussion nonetheless!
     



  • [quote user="asuffield"]

    [quote user="AbbydonKrafts"]HTML is static whereas the others are
    dynamic.
    [/quote]

    The real WTF here is this statement. It sounds like it should make sense but in fact is gibberish. Have you been hanging around with the buzzword goons? It might as well say "HTML is purple whereas the others are chartreuse".

    [/quote]

    It makes perfect sense.  If the page is written in HTML, what you see is what goes out over the wire.  With everything else, this is not the case.



  • [quote user="shadowman"]

    I don't see the wtf... Sounds like they're making an analogy, as in:

    The evolution in web development: 

    HTML -> JSP -> JavaServer Faces

    is equivalent to this older evolution in programming:

    Assembly -> Fortran -> Java
     

    [/quote]

    I quite agree, but the WTF to me is how easy the paragraph can be misread.  It can very easily be misunderstood to say that jsp is fortran.


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