Life is grand

I’ve spent the past hour or so with a co-worker trying to get a Cocoon+Java+RSS+MySQL+XSL+DELI system to do the simplest of tasks. What a nightmare. It is incredible in its flexiblitlity. I can’t think of much it can’t do. But what it does do is very little. It seems as though the chaps who built this system spent 90% of their time on the framework of the application and about 5% on the application itself. It has huge potential but all the bits that actually do things aren’t there. String replace? Nope. I had to find an XSL template that someone else had rewritten to get that.

It’s the autobahn without the Porsche. The scaffolding without the building. The bricks without the builder.

It’s cool and wonderful and so much fun to work with but ultimately it is insanity when all you want is to get the job done. The glass without the beer (thanks for that one, Elaine.)

This is where Ruby on Rails is kicking Java and .NET web-frameworks all over the park. They are visionary and capable of far more than Rails. But Rails actually does common tasks that you need to do. It is less flexible but ultimately more productive.

For those few edge cases that it can’t handle I’ll write a function in something else and pipe it in.