[SPMSDev] Java and SPMS

[Fleet A. S. D. <cn...@br...>]

Well as you both know for reasons that are not yet public I plan to have
a lot more time to simm coming up and I've already reactivated my crew
and I'm up to 10 players now finally.

With all that said I decided it was time to finish the consty website.
It's still running on my own highly customized version of SPMS 1.x. So I
sat down last night to start updating the look and feel of my site.

Thats when I realized something. I really didn't want to have to
manually change every page in my site. So I decided that I need a
templating engine. I don't really want a complete CMS system, Just a
basic templating engine like the one I wrote for TMFSv3. So I sat down
to start working on adding it to the old branch.

Then I realized something else. That I have completely forgotten some of
the basics of PHP. In fact I've forgotten a lot more than most of our
COs will ever know about PHP. I found even the basics of PHP difficult
to remember. Faced with a few hours to brush up on PHP and SPMS I made a
decision. That decision was Screw it I'm a java programmer and that's
what My new site will be in.

So I spent about 3 hours and I'm most of the way completed with a basic
SPMS system that will run on the SPMS1 database completely written in
java, using Struts and Tiles. Of course it'll be using JDBC, JavaMail
and probably log4J before I'm finished.

Ok, Now comes the question, Why? Why Rewrite what Dan is working on when
very few people can or will use a java version. Because.

Just Because.

Ok it doesn't work on my 3 year old either. I'm going to do java because
that is what I capable of maintaing at this point and I wanted to learn
a bit more about Struts and I've now begun to learn about Tiles from the
ground up. Also, as I've said from the beginning. SPMS was never started
to be a big OSS project. It was my personal ships website. People asked
for it and I gave it to them. I am now redoing my own website, It'll be
all java. I'll make as compatible as possible with what Dan is working
on, and I hope to have jSPMS final released when Dan releases SPMSv4 Final.

I'll be using SF for CVS storage for the project. It just makes sense.
It will be completely released under the ASF license since it will rely
almost 100% on Apache and Jakarta projects.

Anyway, at this point I have all the base templateing completed, and
I'll be starting on the manifest, and the join form. First priority is
to get them working with my current database first and then to get them
working with the v4 DB that dan will be using (I'll work on a DB
Conversion script from v1 to v4 at the same time, it is possible just
tedious).

Well that's it from me. I just wanted to let you guys know what the new
repository was that you'll be seeing for our project.

-Ed