Re: OT: The Geek defense



"Charles Hottel" <chottel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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<snip>

You mean no-one may pay you to develop Web Applications. But, with the
right applications, you can generate enough to cover the cost of running
them, even if you don't cover the cost of development hours. And it can
be real fun. There is a camaraderie and helpfulness amongst Web
developers that is quite commendable. I've taken to attending a .NET user
group here where I find I can learn much, contribute a little, and the
people who attend are generally positive and interested. MicroSoft
sponsor it and provide pizza and coffee, but the speakers are mainly from
a local software house who house it on their premises. If you have an
interest in doing Web development, seek out other like minded individuals
who are local to you and you may find it amusing and rewarding.

<snip>

Well I think that I could develop a web app based on what I have read. In
fact they seem somewhat easier in many respects than a desktop app, at
least in Java. The user interface part is HTML versus Swing in Java, which
I find tedious and ocassionally frustrating as far having everything
controlled as you want when the window is resized. Settting up Tomcat
though can be a challenge. I still need to learn more about Java webstart
and I don't know much about creating a web service in Java.

I have finished reading Head First Design Patterns and I have had some
aha! moments similar to when I learned structured programming. I think I
see now why people like OO programming and how they use it. I must admit
though that I still don't love it. I think one of the reasons is that in
OO there is often a big difference between the source code structure and
the run time call structure and I am just not as used to that as I am with
COBOL ways. With COBOL I often drew structure diagrams especially when
analzing code that I was unfamiliar with and trying to learn. But I don't
find that technique very helpful with OO.

I'm not going to defend OO to you, Charlie, although I have never
encountered the objection you posit above.

It isn't about source code and call structures; it is about encapsulated
functionality that can be independently invoked, as and when you want it,
locally or remotely, and with multiple copies of it, if that makes sense.
(It often does in multithreading environments). You are thinking at too low
a level (probably as a result of a lifetime using low level code and
COBOL... It's not "wrong", just irrelevant... Try to think about what the
functionality you require is and break it into small components that can be
re-used. "Small is beautiful". Once you know what you actualy want/need, you
can group some functions into classes and get cracking.

The important thing here is the journey, not the destination :-) You are
reading and thinking and forming opinions and changing them and all of that
is excellent.

I wouldn't use Java for web building any more, but there's no reason why you
can't. With the tools we have today, (Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc) there is
little need to write HTML and your user interface can be visually designed,
with the tool generating the necessary HTML. Start with some fairly simple
static pages and set up IIS on your local machine so you can serve them up
to yourself (or use Apache if you are in a non-MS environment). It is a lot
of fun. I started doing it around 12 years ago and had occasion to drag out
the notebook I used for it, recently.

It was a Pentium 3 with 32MB of RAM! I got all nostalgic looking through
those early projects and almost forgot why I broke it out in the first place
(I want it to be a print server for my wireless LAN, a driver for a 300GB
network backup drive, and I also want it to be an answerphone. As it was
sitting in a box doing nothing, I thought it could be fun to get some more
use out of it. So far, I can't get the wireless adaptor working properly on
it, but I will eventually. (It is Win98 SE; man, things were so much simpler
then...it reboots in 70 seconds; my dual core 2 system running Win XP takes
just on 5 minutes...))

Good luck with your experiements and if you produce anything cool, post it
where we can see it :-)

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."



.

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