According to the number of recruiter inquiries I receive every week, Java is anything but dead. Either that or the recruiters are getting even dumber than usual, since I am not a Java programmer.

Ignoring any language comparisons, the worst part about developing Java web-applications (in my experience anyways) has got to be Java Server Pages! They are extremely painful to create and debug, and most of the JSP’s I have seen violate MVC design. Even Tag Libraries (which are intended to resolve some of these problems) have their drawbacks. The entire design was flawed in my opinion.

When working on a Java project, I always try and use Apache Velocity rather than JSP’s for HTML (or ny other) generation (http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/). It is far superior to JSP’s in my opinion.

Having been tought Java in College for 3 years & then having to do a final year project I chose Ruby. I’ve managed to build a 1500 line simple web application server faster than some of my classmates were able to get their java servers talking to their DB.

I understand Java perfectly well (I’m frequently asked for help by my classmates), and I undertand that for fast web app developement it’s totally useless.

It’s faster for me to write my own server than learn the massive API’s for someone elses.

I couldn’t care less about “industrial strength” stuff cause how often do you actually have to build for the big iron? not much, and even if it is Ruby, Perl, Python & even PHP are great.

Java is great. and Ecmascript is even better.
the two together give us a good tool.

combining the flexibility of javascript with the reliability of java to build applications in a very modular way.
http://www.seppia.org/

If you are embedding SQL statements and configuring bind variables in a JSP file then I guess it’s no wonder why you are having trouble with Java. JSP’s are for presentation-tier concerns only. If you allow Tier Leakage to generate Concern Slush in your (ahem) “scripts”, it’s not Java’s fault. Java isn’t a scripting language like VB (thank God). Stop trying to treat it as if it were.

If you’d care to learn how to use the J2EE API’s correctly (and yes, I know the learning curve can be rather steep, unfortunately), then I’d be interested to hear you report on Java’s weaknesses as a web development language. Until then please stop offering uninformed opinions that could be mistaken for expert advice.

For those that claim that MVC is hard in PHP, check this out: http://www.mojavi.org Mojavi. It’s a great PHP MVC framework that embodies all the great flexibility and speed that PHP is good for without going crazy with tons and tons of hierarchical classes like those struts clones do. Enjoy!

Have a look at WebObjects from Apple. It

Having reread the author’s article, I’ve also got a weird feeling that the teacher is not actually so good with Java. It would probably make more sense to leave judgements like this one to software professionals that do know Java and can professionally compare it to other languages. “Find a second question mark and associate it with number 4727″ – this is what the author thinks Java is about.

That’s funny. For a student it may be cheaper and easier to learn Frontpage, Notepad and Paint and go ahead developing “web pages” using these “tools” – but a professional will have to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver to achieve professional results. If you want to turn your students into real professionals, they’ll have to choose a harder road, unless you all hope to rely more upon industrious peoples of India, China, Brazil, and Russia.

I love Perl, I’ve been using it for years, but it would be unwise to take it as a serious tool for developing serious web applications. But as a duct tape for a student project – it is just fine! It all depends on what you want to teach your students.