I still believe that Java is ideal for the back end portion of a web site or Internet application. When I say “back end”, I am referring to the data manipulation including the use of business rules and data persistence.

Its the use of Java on the front end, the web gui, that I’m not so sure I’m convinced of at this point. When JSP first came out, it seemed so simple, but then we began to get so concerned over separating roles and markup, content, and logic. Now creating a web site is just too much work. Lately, I’ve been using Word Press to do my blogs, and using Open Reports to create a reporting web site. Both of these are great examples of the simplicity in creating web sites. Open Reports creates forms to fill out with a simple web gui interface. Both of them require no “coding” in order to add further pages, change the look and feel, etc. They aren’t as custom as would be needed for most of the web applications I’ve worked on, but, I think we should be able to get to a point where the web front end is as simple as using Word Press, Open Reports, or any of the other CMS type web tools.

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You’ll probably notice an emerging theme over the next few weeks of comparing PHP to Java. Please understand, that I know very little PHP. I am a Java Architect and Developer. But that said, there are a lot of problems in the Java industry right now, and I’m finding it very interesting to compare it to PHP. Perhaps, at the very least the Java community can learn some valuable lessons from PHP.

The Server Side has an article about comparing CMS/Portals in Java and PHP. They found what I have found in comparing many other apps, and that is that PHP generally offers more choices and more functionality. You can read more here.

One of the replies to the article was by Dave C, and I just have to put the text of his comment here. Its has some truth in it. Java can of course, be as simple as he is describing PHP, but as he says, “Java programmers tend to overengineer everything”. I have a gut feeling that he is right, and that in the past, I may well have done that myself.

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The most recent project I have been working on involved creating a large number of reports for the company’s extranet/intranet. In the past, I have usually done reports using some form of JSP and JDBC. But in this case, there is a large number of reports to be developed, and so I was tasked with researching some of the open source solutions for reporting, in hopes we could find a solution that would allow us to get the reports done faster, and be provided to the user with more functionality, and with less custom code.

In the end we compared Crystal reports with JasperReports, and JasperReports was picked. JasperReports is not only free, but also is proven in the Java world, and has a lot of users. It is customizable, since its Java and open source, and has support for using Collections or Lists of Business Objects, such as those populated via Hibernate.

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