Steve Cockwell <stevec@...> writes:
> The result is that I have to finish a B2B application by next Tuesday
> (at least the first stage of it) and got dragged away from my drooling
> over your work. (I prefer doing whatever I please than working for a
> living I'm afraid).
Doesn't everybody? On the other hand, it's the boring grownup stuff
that's really driving BRL development.
> My partner in crime and I have discussed it at length and we really like
> the fact we can get access to the Meta data through BRL. However, he
> feels that he wants to move towards a JSP-type of environment
> (Apache-Tomcat). I'm concerned that with the amount of work that we do
> this will not be efficient enough in the R.A.D. way.
I'm not sure I understand the excitement about meta data. Usually you
know what kind of data you're getting back. I would expect the meta
data to only be useful to some kind of application builder, e.g. a BRL
page that creates other BRL pages when you pass it an SQL query.
I don't understand your parter's reasoning -- you can use BRL in an
Apache-Tomcat environment the same way you use JSP. You could even
combine BRL and JSP pages in one application easily. What exactly is
the motivation for JSP?
I don't actually use JSP, but here's my view from the outside:
JSP can be used in a RAD sort of way for simple tasks. Where I think
you get into trouble is as an app grows from a simple prototype to a
complex system, and the amount of Java code embedded in a page
increases. The Right Thing To Do is move that code into a bean so that
other pages can use it and so the individual page is cleaner.
Realistically, you aren't going to take time to do that unless you
really have to, because of the work involved in wrapping a bean around
that code.
In contrast, it's easy to wrap a procedure definition around Scheme code
and move it out to sitedefs.scm or a compiled Kawa module. Often it's
already a defined procedure in the BRL page, requiring only cut/paste.
The transition from RAD to MVC is natural and easy.
> I plan to take another look at BRL - hopefully in the not too distant
> future. I like the fact that BRL is open-sourced and that the author
> seems to be an intelligent fellow that is interested in his own code :-)
There are also free-software JSP engines that have intelligent
maintainers. I think the reasons I gave above are more pertinent to the
choice between BRL and JSP.
--
Bruce R. Lewis http://brl.sourceforge.net/
|