OT: [Gllug] Debian or Slack

[Ian Scott]

> > 
> > Which is why tomcat and/or resin are inappropriate for production use
> > (amongst other reasons, I should add). But like you say, reality dictates
> > that I have to deal with them, no matter how unpleasant a taste it leaves
> > in my mouth...
> 
> I assume in this case you are referring to the requirement for an SDK
> to compile JSP pages. This has always rather annoyed me too - in the past
> I've considered writing some rules for ANT[1] to compile all the JSP
> pages during the build process & create web.xml mappings for them all.
>

I did this in the last project I rolled out - ant uses Jspc/jasper to compile
all the JSPs.

This removes the slow first load problem, avoids having an SDK on the production
box, and means we get JSP compilation errors at compile time instead of runtime.


> 
> Dan.
> 
> [1] Along with most things in Java, ANT sucks in ooh so many ways. I
>     never thought I'd be glad to be using automake/autoconf again.
>     My current gripe is the lack of an 'if' statement means you have to do 
>     conditional execution of a rule, you need to do convoluted rubbish like 
>     writing a target that sets a variable & then invokes another target 
>     which has an 'unless' attribute set. Grr.


Yeah - ant is good if you just want to compile Java, but it gets nasty if you
do anything vaguely complicated.

I have an ant file that
 - uses different JDKs for different bits of code
 - runs sqlplus wrapped in a Java class to compile PL/SQL
 - precompiles JSPs
 - loads java stored procedures into a database
 - checks config files
... etc, etc.

This is really nasty to maintain, and its slow.  It does Work (Just), but I'd
rather have something that Just Works!

Now I've had to write a perl script to do the releases (and call ant to do the
build) - which is SOOOOOOO much nicer to work with! Every so often my boss
tells me I should rewrite it in ant, and I laugh at him.  




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