[thelist] How do you build dynamic pages?

[Tom Dell'Aringa]

--- raditha dissanayake <jabber at raditha.com> wrote:

> IMHO java application servers are a waste of money in most cases. I
> read an article somewhere that 80% of the time they end up being 
> lowly old servlet containers.

Can you elaborate on this or point me to any reference material?
We're going to be having a planning meeting for our next web site and
I want to have all the information I can. For this particular site,
truly it is a servlet container for the most part. We do have 2 lead
forms that are processed, with a Zip code lookup - nothing big
happening there. No ecom.

> /ExtraDir/ is not always needed.

Can you point me to a reference on how to get rid of it?

> For static pages you are right to question the logic of this
> approach. It would be far less expensive to generate the html once 
> using your script and 'export it' to the web server.

I'm not sure which 'script' you mean here. You mean the dispatcher
scripts? Or have them export all the HTML pages at build time and
have them reside on the web server called direct?

> MVC sure is a good idea but not sure struts is a good idea though
> (shoot 
> me!). As the PHP afficionados will say PHP is the simplest way of 
> building complex web apps. Struts surely would be the most complex
> way of building simple web apps.  Certainly hand coded jsp (or 
> better if you can use servlets) will out performs anything that you

> build using any kind of tag lib.

There were parts of struts that seemed overly complicated - and I've
never been a fan of tag libraries either. It's just more jargon
stuffing up your head. PHP isn't an option here, we are full blown
J2EE and/or M$/ASP - and no .net.

The stuff I'll be tackling over the next year are brand web sites
being redesigned that generally have no ecom capability other than
lead forms and zip lookups. I just want to build them as efficiently
and 'correctly' as possible given what we have. I as an interaction
designer/UI guy am not going to make the engineering team shift to a
new technology. But if I can show a better way to do things...

Tom

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