For the past six months I’ve had the pleasure of working with Rails in my spare time. I’ve read several books, and written several applications for personal use. Soon, I will begin to put most of my spare time toward a Rails application I hope to release to the general public. As well, I will begin to share more of my Rails experiences on my blog. (Watch for new posts on getting started with Rails, like Ruby on Rails - Terms and Concepts).
I remember well the early days of cgi programming when I wrote my first Perl web applications. Then I transitioned to some kind of Oracle web procedures (I forget the real name) for some larger applications for Fortune 500 companies first getting onto the web (ex. Lucent Technologies). Eventually I did Flash and Java applets as they first came out. I made the move to Java (beyond the little applets I’d done) when Sun released the first beta specs of JavaServer Pages, in late 1998. In fact, thanks to the beauty of Internet archives I found this post written by none other than myself while working at Cox Target Media in 1999. (Guess I don’t have to worry about proving I’ve been doing JSP since it first came out). I have been involved in Java web application development ever since. I didn’t take an interest in .NET, and didn’t pay much attention to ColdFusion. I’ve done some PHP, mostly for small solutions and to customize my WordPress blogs. But, for 99% of my web software development in the last 8 years, I have stayed committed to Java.

When I took my second look at Rails about six months ago, and this time, really tried to discover what it was all about, I was really hooked. It made simple so many of the common every day tasks I’ve been doing for years. Ruby really made sense as a language and Rails as a framework. I have a lot to compare to it, and so far I’ve been very impressed with how well thought out it is.

In this series of Rails posts, I’m not going to take time to bash Java or any other languages and frameworks. I still believe Java is a great development platform that fulfills real software development requirements. However, I don’t feel like Java is the solution in every case. I count myself as an Internet Software Developer, not as a Java Developer. I have experience with many tools, and I prefer to choose the right tool for the job at hand. I’ll leave when I would use Java vs Rails to another discussion, as the focus of these posts will be on sharing my Rails experiences, and hopefully helping some other interested Internet Software Developers get their first taste of Rails development. This will not be a discussion of which is the best development platform, but instead will simply be me sharing with you, this new exciting and beautiful web application framework. I truly haven’t had this much fun developing web applications in a long, long time.

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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Currently my hirebrianburridge.com web site is hosted without JSP functionality. However, I’ve written the entire web site in JSP and XML, so that I can simply edit two xml documents (one for the presentation at the beginning and one for the the main resume site). But since I can’t run those JSPs on my web site, I run them locally, and save all the pages (I use an app that does it for me) and ftp them to my hosted site. The only trouble is that I have to alter the links from having the .jsp extensions, and in some cases there is one jsp that takes a page name and produces the content. That link looks like this: index.jsp?slide=pagename. So that’s a lot of editing I have to do to the static html files before ftp’ing them to the live site.

So tonight I looked to see if I could make the .html extension run jsp pages, so that all my links would be correct without having to modify them. I found this helpful Filter which does exactly that. The filter looks at the URL requested, for example index.html, and translates it to index.jsp. I renamed all of my jsps on my local server to the html extension, and now when I run them to get static versions all the links work.

[tags]Java, J2EE, JSP, HTML[/tags]