ECS was created when servlets were the main technology for creating
web
pages. At that time, ECS was an alternative for hard-coding HTML
in your
servlets. Now we have JSPs, XML to XLST, frameworks such as Cocoon,
Tapestry, Wicket., MyFaces, etc With ECS you are still coding your
HTML
in your servlets which is a maintenance nightmare.
Doing direct HTML coding in small easy-to-understand servlets makes
sense for smaller projects. It especially makes sense for in-house
projects where you are focused on providing access to data, not
trying to impress the world with your Web 2.0 features and magazine-
style CSS layouts.
If you are building the next Amazon.com, then yes, you may need the
heft of a framework.
Those of us writing simple reports for in-house use would much rather
whip up some simple servlets than spend weeks studying some
framework's source-code, miles of email archives, and obscure bug-
reports.
We might also find debugging to be much simpler when tracing through
our own code and a few calls to ECS rather than a mountain of
framework code.
The development
community has moved on to MVC frameworks.
Make that "some of" the development community.
ECS specifically died because anyone who expresses an interest gets
slapped down with a condescending attitude that "only idiots and
children do direct HTML coding, all the cool kids use endlessly
complicated, gnarly frameworks with 18-layers of abstraction." Plus
they offer the bonus feature of endless revising and re-architecting.
And then eventually that framework fades away as the new framework-du-
jour takes its place.
This framework mania may be the reason why so many developers have
fled Java, and are running to PHP, Ruby on Rails, M$, etc.
My advice:
- If ECS works for you, use it. Get your work done, go home, kiss the
spouse, walk the dog.
- If you get tired of the snobby framework retorts, start a similar
project of your own somewhere else in cyberspace.
--Basil Bourque
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