Sticking up a little for the VB language here – VB has its uses. It builds pretty Windows front-ends quickly and has a low learning curve.

Of course, a lot of that goes away with VB.NET.

To me, his biggest gripe seemed to be about bind variables in a PreparedStatement. That’s really very minor in the grand scheme of things.

Also, part of the reason Java takes longer in initial development is that it nearly forces one to write abstractly and in an object-oriented fashion. Sure it takes a little longer, but maintenance is much, much faster than in procedural PHP. One could completely change databases for a JSP application and it would be transparent if coded correctly from the get-go. Try doing this in procedural PHP (PHP 5 excluded, of course).

We’re not using much of JSP, mostly just the include function and some custom tags to translate/output xsl, and in a few places just dumping the variables out to the page if we don’t need to use XSL for it.

However, without knowing the project for sure it’s hard to say, but to me this smells that you are doing something wrong. It is not very common to need string replacements anyway, and the fact that you need them sounds like you have someone who’s trying to think in Perl or PHP while trying to program Java.

Java requires a certain… twist in the mindset to be efficient, and once you have been able to do that twist, you will see its power and elegance. However, if your mindset is oriented towards something like Perl, you _will_ hate Java because it is difficult to write things in it. And you are probably much more efficient in writing something like PHP.

(BTW, JSP is a mistake from Sun, I think. You really want to use something like Velocity if you want to build dynamical web pages properly.)

Now, is there a way to do a replace in JSP without using any custom tag libraries? :-)

And on the article: anyone who seriously considers Visual Basic as a programming language should be taken with a grain of salt.

I got to listen to our consultant’s assistant explain to me how doing something that simple in java would be very complicated for him and be extremely inefficient and slow down the application, because he’d basically have to write something custom that would loop through the string character by character, count the number of characters til it finds the piece it needs to find, then truncate the string and combine it with the part on the other side, for as many times as the item is found (or something like that).

Now, I don’t know java… I can read it a bit, and I can manage some basic JSP… but this guy’s supposed to be very good… so I assume he wasn’t feeding me a line of BS…. But BS that certainly is. Why on earth should people have to bend over backwards to do something as simple as a string replacement?