or... "hey, in the past few years they actually made some of this stuff not suck!"
so i've been playing around with server side java web application stuff lately, servlets and jsp's and all that jaz. it's pretty neat. so far i've run across the following cool things that i would have loved to have had when i was actually doing this stuff for real:
- ant. ok, technically they did have this when i was doing java, but i never really used it, and i really should have cause it rocks.
- junit. we all know how much i love unit testing with cppunit, and junit is even cooler than cppunit since they've got a lot of custom extensions to it to simplify testing specific kinds of applications (like server side code that's notoriously hard to test).
- struts. james farley mentioned this stuff to me a while back, and i finally got around to taking a look over the weekend. great stuff.
so now i'm toying with a little java webapp that's backed by a postgres database (oh, another cool thing: the postgres JDBC connector, a full reimplementation of the postgres network protocol in java, so you get all the stuff you need to connect to the database just by dropping in a jar file).
maybe it'll get far enough along that i'll throw the svn repos up where people can get at it, who knows...
at the very least it'll let me polish up my java skills, which are very rusty at this point.
oh, and i almost forgot! the absolute coolest thing about all this java stuff is that it all just worked on the first try on my powerbook! maybe there is something to this 'cross platform' stuff after all...
