Hell broken loose!!!
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Ok, yes I know. There is a delay yet again! Delays seem to have become an inseparable part of this project.
Yes, the website was supposed to be ready this week. And this time it REALLY was...... until all hell broke lose....
It goes like this... I had planned to make the original site in asp.net and it was going really well, until... I reached this license generation part. Now although .net is a photocopy of Java in quite a lot of places, there is one place where they totally differ and that is the crytpgraphy api, which is completly different in both of them in terms of both implementation and interface. Now of course I didnt know of this from before so I was really pretty shocked...... so i decided to do some interop stuff, but guess what... that doesnt work either between these two!!! The format of keys generated is completly different and incompatible, so as AS itself is in Java, the keys had to be generated using Java code too.
Thus finally, I had to resort to the solution which I was absolutely, totally dreading.
I had to code the entire site in Java!!!
Now I have never used java for web development stuff before. So the all nighters began.... googling , reading, learning a whole bunch of stuff.
It was ( is, as I am still doing it) a nightmare. The Java world is full of crappy open source frameworks which although are nice but have no docs, are a pain to learn and they have almost no ide support. And people who attended antlr 2005 workshop probably know how much i hate tools without ide support.
So first I looked at struts, which was complex as hell... then after reading some opinions on the web, I decided jsf & hibernate is the way to go.
And really after taking a real close look at both .Net and Java for web developement I am absolutely compelled to say this to all the java web developers-
Java SUCKS!!!
The implementation of JSF is half baked and nowhere near what MS has done with asp.net. Sun is really playing catch up on this.
Hibernate is just waaay too complex. Its documentation absolutely, totally sucks and its taken me the whole day today figuring out its mapping stuff. I now think it would have been faster had I just written the queries by hand.
With asp.net all you need is Visual Studio and Msdn along with MySql, you can even use asp web matrix, if you want a cheap ide. They got real nice documentation and all you really need is a single good book to write your web app.
But with Java I got all sorts of stuff installed. I got this MyEclipse plugin for eclipse, Java Studio Creator, Apache Tomcat and these zillions of lib files.
I am going crazy searching for and reading all the different docs and oh my, are these Ides slow or what!!! Java Studio is sooooo sluggish!!!
Also the fact that I caught a bad cold and was absolutely down for 2 days in between all this, did not help matters either :(
So right now I am sitting up all night and day trying to make sense of jsf & hibernate and trying to complete the site. I am looking to setup the shopping system first within a couple of days or so, thus purchasing can begin. I will complete and update the entire site as time passes.
I guess the guys from Sun need to give me some reward for learning JSF & Hibernate in record time ;-)
Believe me, as fed up as you guys probably are, each passing day I feel more and more guilty for not completing the site. I really am trying my best and hope to have the site up as soon as possible.
P.S. - if you know of any nice tutorials/books/free jsf components that can help me complete the site fast please let me know.
Yes, the website was supposed to be ready this week. And this time it REALLY was...... until all hell broke lose....
It goes like this... I had planned to make the original site in asp.net and it was going really well, until... I reached this license generation part. Now although .net is a photocopy of Java in quite a lot of places, there is one place where they totally differ and that is the crytpgraphy api, which is completly different in both of them in terms of both implementation and interface. Now of course I didnt know of this from before so I was really pretty shocked...... so i decided to do some interop stuff, but guess what... that doesnt work either between these two!!! The format of keys generated is completly different and incompatible, so as AS itself is in Java, the keys had to be generated using Java code too.
Thus finally, I had to resort to the solution which I was absolutely, totally dreading.
I had to code the entire site in Java!!!
Now I have never used java for web development stuff before. So the all nighters began.... googling , reading, learning a whole bunch of stuff.
It was ( is, as I am still doing it) a nightmare. The Java world is full of crappy open source frameworks which although are nice but have no docs, are a pain to learn and they have almost no ide support. And people who attended antlr 2005 workshop probably know how much i hate tools without ide support.
So first I looked at struts, which was complex as hell... then after reading some opinions on the web, I decided jsf & hibernate is the way to go.
And really after taking a real close look at both .Net and Java for web developement I am absolutely compelled to say this to all the java web developers-
Java SUCKS!!!
The implementation of JSF is half baked and nowhere near what MS has done with asp.net. Sun is really playing catch up on this.
Hibernate is just waaay too complex. Its documentation absolutely, totally sucks and its taken me the whole day today figuring out its mapping stuff. I now think it would have been faster had I just written the queries by hand.
With asp.net all you need is Visual Studio and Msdn along with MySql, you can even use asp web matrix, if you want a cheap ide. They got real nice documentation and all you really need is a single good book to write your web app.
But with Java I got all sorts of stuff installed. I got this MyEclipse plugin for eclipse, Java Studio Creator, Apache Tomcat and these zillions of lib files.
I am going crazy searching for and reading all the different docs and oh my, are these Ides slow or what!!! Java Studio is sooooo sluggish!!!
Also the fact that I caught a bad cold and was absolutely down for 2 days in between all this, did not help matters either :(
So right now I am sitting up all night and day trying to make sense of jsf & hibernate and trying to complete the site. I am looking to setup the shopping system first within a couple of days or so, thus purchasing can begin. I will complete and update the entire site as time passes.
I guess the guys from Sun need to give me some reward for learning JSF & Hibernate in record time ;-)
Believe me, as fed up as you guys probably are, each passing day I feel more and more guilty for not completing the site. I really am trying my best and hope to have the site up as soon as possible.
P.S. - if you know of any nice tutorials/books/free jsf components that can help me complete the site fast please let me know.
4 Comments:
commented by Mark Miller, 6:45 AM, October 27, 2005
Actually I got a hosting account on a remote server and they obviously dont allow me to execute or install anything, so I cant use ikvm :(
All you've got to do is compile the relevant java code into an assembly using the ikvm static compiler (ikvmc.exe). Then you use it as if it were a .NET assembly (because it is). There's no installation necessary.
you should take a look at exadel studio (eclipse plugin). i've tried it and it really speeds up things a lot...
You should just use IKVM (http://www.ikvm.net/) and run the java code in .NET. That should be much easier.