Re: What do I use?

I enjoyed the thread. I have a challenge (sort of). We all have coded
it in one form or another. You have 3 drop downs (or more) the second
can not be populated until the first is chosen, the 3rd after the
second, etc.
Well, they whole app is like this. We can't tell the client;- this is
a mistake, your business rules are wrong.Can we?
Doing this in Javascript is a nightmare enough for me to pay close
attention. More I/O's just defeats the purpose. So here we are, can't
even pick the states of the union without a multi-million dollar
wait-state on the web.
I suppose Ajax is an answer to that problem.
I imagine google is the fastest thing going, and my gMail is slower
100% of the time than any compiled windows DLL I've written is. I
switched, but the browser is just not ready yet for the mundane we
take for granted, "show me a page of text" ...and 12-15
advertisements. gMail is quite a complex interface. It's hard to say
what is better.

Given the complexity and target for the different screens how you can
not plan for both, prepare for both requirements eventually, from the
start and still arrive at the same conclusions in toolsets.

Ideally, I would have re-usable parts targeted to any platform with a
standard interface that does not require skill sets so different that
it takes 2 people routinely. "C" will do this quite nicely. Then we
choose presentation, why choose two? and so on.

Not omitting the drop down requirement, you set out to build a
framework and bank the farm on your tool choice. - not simply playing
with the cards dealt, choose your deck. It seems the first step to
insanity is to choose one technology from left field and the other
from right field and expect them to work together later.

If I had unlimited resources, I still don't think I would choose Java
but I have no real good reason other than the error messages that spew
from the multi-million dollar websites ($assumption) that I hit at the
payment centers, etc. (of course, we don't write stuff like that) It
scares me to think of what kind of fix I could be in with all that
code you just call and hope for the best.
Web programming is harder, you can not control the session as you can
otherwise, if you can, then I guess it has evolved to something ELSE.
You can not tell if it is first time or 4th page back without coding for it.
That is also a nightmare. Can you expect the client program to retain
all that data? that is what is slowing it down maybe, we keep saving
needless data for the next time they are recognized.
I could go on and on.
This stuff is so primitive compared to what it should be.