7/27    So what do people here think of Tomcat/Velocity for web application
        development?  Is there a future in it?  I'm looking for something
        more useful than PHP and something that's not Perl.     -randal
        \_ If you are going to go the Tomcat route, I think it is
           worthwhile taking a look at Struts. JSP is nasty but Struts
           makes it somewhat usable. -payam
           \_ What's wrong with traditional Servlets?
              \_ Separation of the front-end design from the back-end
                 logic is usually considered a good thing.
                 \_ thank you for not capitalizing "good thing"
                 \_ And you can't do this using Servlets because...?
                    \_ Because I'm loath to allow designers to start
                       mucking around with .java files and build scripts.
                       From my experience, it's just too foreign for your
                       average designmonkey. JSP/php/blah files
                       at least look like normal HTML. Plus, today
                       there is reasonable tool support for designers to use.
                       \_ Designers? You mean the artists don't you. The
                          ones who talk about flows and usability and look
                          and feel. My experience has been that we just
                          end up rewriting thier shit anyway. I just use
                          them for icons, style sheets and proofreading.
                          Its all thier english degrees are good for anyway.
                          \_ yeah, you certainly need people to proof-read
                             your stuff.  It's spelled "their," and "it's" is
                             the contraction for which you're looking.  but
                             with all due respect, coders generally don't
                             seem to be good authorities on usability either.
        \_ JSP is evil. Velocity is Perlish (ergo crap). Use the real thing:
                http://freemarker.sourceforge.net