Tomcat Based Webmail

[Zbigniew Koziol]

Neil Watson wrote:
>
> In my experience the problem is how Java is used and by whom.  If the
> best thing about Java is its portability then why do I often experience
> applications that cannot be migrated easily?  In another use I've seen
> folks spend considerable time and effort creating several hundred kb of
> Java code to perform some regex work on EDI files.  It never occurred to
> them that the same thing could be accomplished with only a few hundred
> lines of perl, sed or awk in a fraction of the time.
>
> Good programmers use the tools that are best for the job.  They are
> smart enough to learn what tools they need.  Bad programmers stick with
> what they know even if it is the hammer instead of the screw driver.
>

A good programmer should know a few languages at least and be able to 
choose which one to use and for what. I do not mean that she should know 
perfectely each of these languages. I do not see need for that. But at 
least she should have an idea about how to use them, how they are 
different, how efficient and in what, etc.

Java applications, I have such a feeling, are done mostly by windows 
programmers who often do not have a feeling or idea that some features 
run differentelly on another system. I have a good example. I have been 
working with MapInfo java application. This is a a very big company 
(actually, now it is owned by another one). They provide map data and 
software in java (not only in java) to be used with these data. I was 
working on Linux and all their software and data were supposed to work 
on Linux (with java). But I had a huge pain to make things working. Why? 
Silly, trivial problems! Programmers assumed for instance that file 
names are not case sensitive!

In general, I agree with someone else who posted before: Java 
applications are supposed to run on any platform. But they seldom do.

zb.


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