Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I have been kind of lax in posting some of these things, but there are some moderately interesting whippings of the dead horse this week.

Gosling had a sitdown with JDJ where he discussed the nature of Ruby and PHP. That, of course, smells of nerd holy war. Assaf takes him to task on his characterization of Ruby and PHP as single-purpose languages, Hansson says that versatility is overrated anyway, Artima dubs the whole thing moot but has a good discussion.

Also at Artima, a paper that explains that code generation is back, and it's baaaad. It is a well written paper, but this kind of goes to the Model Driven Dev model which I have espoused for a while. I know code generation still gets a bit of a bad rap. HOWEVER, the author does miss the fact that Hibernate, in face, IS a code generator. It works by generating subclasses of your pojos to handle the mapping. What it does lack, however, is that first step as well as a more reasonable "convention over configuration" attitude.

The Great Web Framework Survey continues with RIFE. I have glanced at RIFE in the past, and it seems like a good system. It is very much a RAILS system with more of what I would call a "Java Flavor" -- it is done like you do things in Java rather than trying to copy something else. I REALLY don't like the fact that it has it's own Velocity-style templating system. Why can't use JSP/JSTL and some custom taglibs still escapes me. Of course, why JSP doesn't have something equiv to RIFE's ${v WEBAPP:ROOTURL/} is beyond me too :P.