RE: Classic Traps -- I need your input!

Hi Scott,

I think your point about separating DB I/O and screen I/O could be expanded to a discussion of writing modular code in general, and especially placing reusable code in callable components instead of embedding the same code in many applications. I think we've become better at this than, say 20 years ago, but in Web applications I've seen quite a bit of JavaScript and CSS code embedded in HTML files instead of being placed in a common source directory and referenced from HTML files.

Another problem I've seen with J2EE applications in particular is that common code files are deployed in every application directory instead of being placed in a global directory and referenced from the application. I'm not sure what it is about J2EE, but there seems to be a tendency to deploy many applications in a single application directory, which leads to huge WAR files and related ANT scripts.

I don't want to ignite a language or platform war, but maybe I can say in an ambiguous way that the most classic trap I've witnessed, and the one that ends up costing the most, and being the most frustrating, are the broadly scoped efforts to migrate applications off the System i, or rewrite everything to work under platform agnostic runtime environments.

Nathan.