[SWLUG] Not seeing the Code for the IDE

[peter]

Hi Justin - see below:

Justin Mitchell wrote:

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 19:42, peter wrote:


>
>>I'm writing, or trying to write, secure, n-Tier, distributed and
>>hopefully cross-platform apps.  It is not feasible to choose a
>>language like C (or C++) to do that - because I'm already 58 years old
>>and I'd like to get some apps finished before I die.
>>    
>>
>These are programming styles, nothing to do with the development
>environment or language being used.  
>  
>
They are styles only in a very superficial sense.  What I am referring 
to is the necessity to have a massive superstructure available to 
support this kind (style, if you like) of development.

>You can write programs that fit all of these criteria in pretty much any
>language, 
>
Yes you can - but not in a sensible timescale

>heck i think even shell script fulfuls the goals,
>
Now you're being silly

> lets see
>now:
>secure: goes without saying, be careful delimiting user input.
>  
>
Could do with a big "etc" there.  If you think that's all there is to 
security, you may have problems

>n-tier: afaics thats just writing layers of abstraction
>  
>
It is, but it's closely related to:

>distributed: networking is pretty easy using netcat
>  
>
... until you find you need to do all your own marshalling and 
serialisation (for call by reference and call by value) - not to mention 
setting up session parameters, object pooling, remote object lifetime 
management, concurrency and so on.  If you really think that this is 
just about making some TCP/IP connections, then I'm sorry, we are just 
not talking about the same thing at all.  And anyway you may want to use 
something other than a binary protocol.  You may, for instance want to 
create and consume web services.

>cross-platform: cant get much more cross platform than a script
>
>  
>
And they'd be just fine - if only they provided any of the facilities 
I've been talking about.  They don't.

>>The emphasis here is on "n-Tier" and "distributed" in respect of the
>>lack of F/OSS choices.  These things require a huge amount of
>>ready-prepared infrastructure - of plumbing, if you like. 
>>    
>>
>ahhh, so your not talking about the same kind of development
>environments after all, ie enviroments to make programming in a given
>language easier. what your talking about are lego brick 'programming' (i
>use the term loosely) tools.
>
>Well, yup, i guess hands up there, cant say ive seen many 'plug the
>blocks together', rapid development tools i think they call them?
>well, other than the ones designed to teach children simple programming
>concepts ;)
>
>Perhaps someone else will have suggestions on this subject.
>  
>
These last few paragraphs are not worthy.  Your suggestion that people 
involved in this kind of development are at the level of children is 
sad.  What you are really saying is that you have no experience of these 
things - and therefore they must be too simple and childish for you to 
entertain.

Component-based development is not as you described it - especially for 
those of us involved in building the components.  I'm sure there is a 
super-class of uber geek who can knock these things off in C in a couple 
of weeks: but I don't belong to that class - and neither do any of the 
developers I've worked with over a very long working life (I retire in 7 
years).  I don't believe you do either.

If you really want to know about the development of large-scale systems 
of the type I'm referring to, I suggest you read some books before you 
make the sort of comments you make above.  You might then have a go at 
installing JBoss on a spare machine, MySQL on another, Apache on another 
and your favourite development tools on another.  You can then have a go 
at writing some JSP pages with servelets that run in Apache and which 
call business logic encapsulated in JavaBeans running on your app server 
to check the data, then retrieve data from your database running on the 
MySQL server and return the results to the web page.  You might then 
like to reproduce the whole thing as a shell script for me.  I'd be glad 
to see the result.  Or you could do it all in C.

Don't try to do anything very complicated.  Just pretend your database 
contains usernames, passwords and security groups and try to return the 
user groups to the program on your web server and thence to your web 
page to either accept or reject a login, and then to either authorise or 
otherwise access to a web page on your site that is restricted to 
members of only certain groups.

As a final exercise you could try deploying your shell script/C program 
on servers running on three different continents.

My apologies if I seem annoyed.  It's because I am.  However, I hope I 
have avoided being rude.

Cheers

Peter