Eating crows

When you have to take back things you have said, things you thought and change your way of thinking completely, it is sometimes called eating Crows, like the bird, which no one eats, and no one would eat, guess it is called that since doing so would be considered very hard.

I have been working hard on studying Javascript. For some time and since I come from mostly C based languages like C, Objective C, Perl, PHP and so forth with Ruby added on top, it has been harder than I thought. Using anonymous functions, or functions without names does take some time getting used to. But this is all going well now, and I keep getting better.

Just for fun, I decided to have a look at Java again. Perhaps it is wrong to say again since I have not looked at Java since ca 1997-8 or something like that, and I never used it even then. It failed so miserably in creating desktop applications that I did not use it.

I have been meaning to use it much more, but there have always been much better solutions. First it was PHP, then Cake PHP which lead me to use Ruby on Rails, which I am a huge fan of. I though it would take me a long time to learn Ruby, but it only took a few hours until I was getting there and less than 2 days later I had re-made my family website in Ruby on Rails, from Cake PHP.

Now when I changed jobs last time, I found that they use something called Play framework for everything they did. My boss at the time loved it so much that I felt I just had to have a look. But back in my head I just thought about the "other" java web frameworks, even other Java rails clones with their awful xml config files for everything. Not my cup of tea, thank you very much. But my boss was such a huge fan that I gave him the benefit and installed it.

The installation was so simple. The Eclipse installation was a horror, install this, add that, update this, but I got that over. But every time I clicked on a css file, or something that wasn't Java, Eclipse opened up an external application to view that file. I did not like that, and it was just silly. It should work the other way around, if I really want to edit a file in Coda, I should ask Eclipse to do that. But I did remember that SUN, my former employer had bought or made an editor called Netbeans. So I gave it a try. It was not love at first sight. I thought it didn't redraw itself correctly, but it worked, and gave me great code complete in Java, which I needed. Then once I checked in my code in Git I figured out what the redraw issue was, it was showing me unchecked code. And after working for a few hours in Netbeans I liked it a lot.

But as for Play Framework, I was just blown away. No one complains about Java speed in a server level, but this was just mind blowing. Play framework was so fast and used very little resources. I had to swallow quite a lot in the first day. Then for the next few days I learnt a lot more. Now I am writing all my web code using Play framework, never looking back. I no longer hate Java, it is very good. Now I have a few websites up and running, mostly just to learn. I will write more about them in other posts.

Links :

http://www.playframework.org
http://jquery.com
http://cakephp.org
http://rubyonrails.org