RE: VS.NET vs. J2EE - how rad is RAD?

> From: MEovino@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> If one of the things you're looking at is the ease of development (i.e.
> Visual Studio RAD style tooling vs. hand-coding HTML), I don't know that
> it's a fair fight yet.  It seems like .NET has it all over any J2EE
> toolsets when it comes to drag-and-drop development.

For me, RAD development isn't the issue.  It's great for prototyping, but
you then still have to sit back and do the real architecture and design of
your application, whether it's e-business or ERP.  Saving a few hours today
doesn't mean squat to the cost of trying to maintain what becomes in fact a
myriad of ad hoc applications.

I guess I'd be okay if there was a step wherein you went back and took your
RAD application and then reverse engineered it back into your overall system
architecture, but that's not what I see from the RAD tools.

>
> >From what I've just learned about Java Server Faces, however, it
> seems like
> the J2EE crowd is learning that they need to be as RAD as the .NET guys.
> I've really grown to distrust WYSIWYG development tools for web apps, but
> what JSF promises is really cool and could close the gap (especially if
> WSSD/WSAD/WSDCi provide good support for it).

I don't know.  JavaServer Faces is yet another set of XML tags that are
trying to define an application.  Nobody has come up with the silver bullet
yet.  Each new set of tags looks great until you actually try to use it.

For example, Struts was pretty cool.  Then it became clear it needed some
help.  First it was templates, and now it's Tiles, and the two aren't very
compatible, so there goes backwards compatibility.  And Struts was pretty
darned simple.  JSF is already a complex beast, and there's no reason to
believe it's ready for primetime yet, so chances are you won't have a really
usable specification for a while.

I'll wait and see, thank you.

Joe