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Blogs ยป Archive for April 21st, 2006
Tomcat sucks… Is Apache flawed?
High on my list of Java blogs is Hani Suleiman’s The BileBlog, in which he gives unapologetically abrasive reviews of popular Java projects and the people behind them. In the past, he has had been less than complimentary of the Apache Project’s various open source (”opensores”) Java offerings like Maven and Struts. Today, he took Tomcat to task.
Tomcat, of course, provides the reference implementations for the Servlet and JSP specifications, but by virtue of the fact that it is free, it’s also the server of choice for many small-to-medium businesses. I took a critical look at Tomcat myself awhile back, while looking for a beginner-friendly Java web application server (I’m still looking).
Suleiman’s critique of Tomcat is based, somewhat refreshingly (he often resorts to unpersuasive, if entertaining, personal attacks on the developers), on the quality of the project’s code–or rather its lack thereof. Choosing a pivotal but relatively uncomplicated class (DefaultServlet, which is responsible for serving static resources like HTML/CSS/JavaScript files and images), he points out many examples of terrible coding practice, of which these are only a sampling:
Initialization code that lazily catches Throwable
// …
Atlas disappoints in cross-browser support
(via digg) An interesting discussion has begun on Leland Scott’s blog following his testing of Microsoft’s Atlas AJAX framework in various (non-IE) browsers.
The gist of Scott’s tests is that the Atlas code doesn’t work across all browsers. Most of the UI controls get a tick in the box when tested in Firefox, but in Opera and Safari most of them either fail or don’t work as expected.
This is obviously disappointing, given the amount of hype Atlas has had, and considering there are so many other great open source toolkits out there already that work in all modern browsers. Obviously in the rush to get Atlas out, “cross-browser” was interpreted by the Atlas developers to mean “make it work in Firefox”, with the “Community Technology Preview” stamp being used as an excuse for why the rest of them fail.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to take a lot of Scott’s reportage seriously, considering the blatant anti-Microsoft bias that shows through. Still, it’s the screenshots that tell the story, and with the surge in popularity of ASP.NET and the marketing campaign behind Atlas, the toolkit is certainly going to be in wide-spread use. So unless …
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