struts sucks. tapestry sucks. gwt sucks. they all suck, so there, nyah.

(1 comment)
2007.03.27
Techie disagreements at work. I'm supposed to be scouting various UI packages, but I can't shake the conviction that the MVC plumbing is the wrong place to be adding complexity, that writing Servlets and JSPs is easy, and few packages buy you more in functionality and getting people to do things "right" than they cost you in complexity.

Bums me out, that I'm either gonna have to try to press the case or just grin and bear it. It also worries me that I'm too conservative about embracing new platforms.


Webshow of the Moment
Slate on Zefrank, who has ended his daily 3-minute show after a brilliant one year run. His main site, Zefrank.com, has been on my backlog since 2003. Seriously! I kept meaning to get to it, go through all the cool toys (that's when the toys, and a few little videos, were all there was there) and link to just the best ones, but you know? 3 or 4 years on, I'm gonna call it a wash.

Besides the cleverness of his stuff, the other thing is the remarkable amount of polish in it, from the interface of the toys, to the quality of the editing of the video, to just the overall experience.

If you're in a hurry, just check out the episode complicated... the idea of "just start playin' with it" is a great one. Way too often my fear of not doing something optimally, or getting stuck in some kind of dead end, leads me to do a lot less than I think I theoretically could.

Gotta say though, while it didn't have the manic energy or pace of Zefrank, in terms of foreshadowing the whole video blogging thing, computer stew is looking more and more amazing. (Same guy who did Zug.com and all the pranks to come from there.) And sad, how the archive are all these slow-to-download-yet-still-tiny-screened Real media things.