Is it safe to wake a hibernating language ?

I love ASP.net / C# and i love them with a passion to the point that i use it at just about any point possible i can when i develop applications.

Unfortunately that love for the language bit me in the proverbial behind. While i do keep up with whats happening in the Dev Tech market as new languages are phased in and old ones phased out i still tend too look out for the .Net specifics and tend to let the rest take a place on the back burner.

Please note all languages discussed here are in relation to the web.

So a while back i took some time out and updated my self with Ruby and Python (Python was more of just a web update since i already learnt it a while back). And i really enjoyed the way the new frameworks have progressed to the point where some one could actually use it as a clean and efficient RAD tool.

The other tool that i investigated at the time was netbeans (a jsp and more dev environment). Since i had knew java as one of my programming languages ( i might add a under used one) i used it for a bit and while it did seem interesting the tools offered by the IDE were quite thin. This was all fine since i never needed to use it for web design only windows or Linux. So a few days ago i decided to help a friend of mine with a project of his ,but a requirement of the project was that it needs to be done JSP but connect to MS SQL .While this is not an entirely odd request it kept on knocking me down with a couple of snags.

These days i rarely enjoy working with data access directly and instead prefer to use a framework of any kind. Just so long as i can work with objects and not have to write select and insert statements. Having never used any framework of this kind in java I and like and good programmer cracked google open and proceeded to searched for java frameworks.

A options presented themselves , one was Netbeans built-in persistence framework and the famous Hibernate (There is actually a .Net implementation called NHibernate which is frustrating and fun at the same time , but thanks to many tools to help out its more fun ). So I decided to use hibernate after trying for ages to get the built-in frame work to work and failing at each attempt, it seems that the framework does not like MS SQL. As with NHibernate it’s the tools that makes it so easy to use that allows it to be a functional framework , so on I go and look for some hibernate tools and lo and behold there are some awesome tools available , I chose to use Firestorm DAO Enterprise Edition and i have to say that it’s and excellent tool.

So after getting my classes generated and my project setup and cleaned to use the said generated classes , I began working on the actual problem at hand. What I where required to achieve was simply put the equivalent of a .Net repeater in JSP .Man, never have I had such a problem mimicking some thing in one language that can be done in another. For one there is no built-in repeater control and the table control that comes built into netbeans does not allow you to create template columns. After spending about 2 days trying to get a repeater generated , I had to concede defeat and google for a control on the net.

While my friend and i did find some promising results, none of them were built into netbeans and required an extra download to and already huge download. Also the said control did have netbeans support so you have to use them via XML which is not the easiest way to develop, after all; the reason I chose netbeans as a dev IDE was for its ease of use.

Also the reason I mentioned the other languages above was because I could achieve the required results in a 1/10 th of the time and get it to work. The same thing goes for .Net, I could achieve the required results in about 5 mins. While I know that .Net and in particular Visual Studio does pamper you with the amount of controls available and the ability to configure these controls to suit your will, it is definitely no reason for the other IDE’s and languages to depend on this and not build their own libraries.

I guess that bringing a language out of hibernation after such a long time and expecting to get the same results is almost impossible. However; it’s things like this that end up shunning new developers from the language and environment.

If anyone has any good books related to JSP / Netbeans Dev, please forward the link or books to me .

Part 2 : The right tool for the right job ,will be published soon i hope.

Thanks

Jameel Haffejee
Edited By : Francois Wiid