stephenwoods.net

Julien, who is a super genius, has a write up building apps with ant, including the all important concatenation of js and css files. In my experience a shocking number of people working on web apps have no build process beyond “copy the files to the server”. Tools like ant make it easy to deploy.

Wait…what if I think java is the devil and prefer PHP? You are in luck, because Phing is the same thing but for PHP. Even better, it includes phpunit testing tools.

An interesting post on Java. I think the comparison with COBOL is very apt, because despite the fact that few new projects are being started in Java it is so common in the enterprise I think we will all be supporting Java apps for years to come.

I think it is right that Java is not a bad language, its just that development practices are so unwieldy. The frameworks are huge and hard to work with, the core libraries are sparse and the JVM is slooow. But, as  Russel says, if you are developing long running server processes. PHP is really unacceptable for this, your options are Java, .net or c/c++. And none of those are good options.