Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

my current project has revealed to me what i kinda knew from beforehand: Java blows cock.  maybe i'm inexperienced with it or am not knowledgable enough to make it productive for myself, but compared to scripting languages, Java is a REAL fucking pain!

let me justify myself a little.  Eclipse is a cool tool.  but it's so fucking PHAT that unless you have a shitload of memory, you'll only be able to get that plus a few more items loaded on your desktop.  i think this mostly stems from the fact that Java is such a memory hog.  i don't know how people can optimize with Java in terms of memory.  waiting until the garbage collector kicks in just doesn't cut it for me either.

then you have library dependency hell.  if you're not using a good IDE like eclipse (or if you're into torture by doing everything by hand), you're pretty much screwed when getting everything together.  there was, for instance, a nasty little problem with the antlr jar file that i found against WebLogic.  if you use Hibernate and WebLogic together, you're going to run into this problem.  solution?  make antlr appear before WebLogic's version on the classpath. 

then you have the monstrous XML configuration hell.  no wonder Ruby on Rails is so popular.  because you have to package everything up into an ugly little war file, you can't simply put all your configurations into one spot easily.  if you're running in production, you have to externalize some configuration files and even then stop and restart the web server.  geeze!

and then there's the whole J2EE server vs J2EE server crap.  i thought the whole idea was to write once, deploy anywhere? you still have to deal to some level with reconfiguring things (at least with our application).  for instance, the antlr issue with Hibernate.  and don't get me started on EJBs.

the other thing Java severely is in need of is inlining or variable interpolation.  variable interpolation would make one's life so easy.  also,  i just can't see the point in having types in Java for webapps.  you end up being forced to check to see if a string is a number and then converting to a number regardless rather than doing some magic during runtime like PHP or perl.

the thing that miffs me the whole is just the whole process of having to compile, war, and deploying something in several different steps compared to fixing a file and refreshing a page.

someone once told me that Java is the new Cobol.  Can we call Java COBOL 2.0?  i'm starting to believe it....