Today's (Mon) SIGJava meeting at SIG3000 included an interesting
presentation from (flying without notes here) James H. Young
of Lutris, keepers of Enhydra.

   http://www.enhydra.org
   http://www.lutris.com

Mr. Young noted that Enhydra developed out of a consulting
project, with FedEx being the first to use it as a tool for
their sales force.  Until recently, Kinko's was the largest
user (I presume that means they had the largest installation,
as opposed to the size of Kinko's itself).  There was a passing
reference to a "Fortune 10" customer, but Mr. Young was not at
liberty to provide further details.

Apparently Jon Diercks (currently with ORBiT) gave a presentation
to the Solution Symposium on Friday discussing Enhydra on MPE.
Mr. Young relayed that the Lutris folks in attendance thought
the presentation was excellent.  Hopefully, this material will
be made available to all.


Enhydra, Tomcat, and JSP pages
------------------------------

Of interest to me was the revelation that while Enhydra includes
the Tomcat web container (which is what runs servlets and
JavaServer Pages), Tomcat is provided almost coincidentally.

   http://jakarta.apache.org

That is, Mr. Young believes that the Enhydra way of developing
web applications is superior to JavaServer Pages (JSP), so
effectively Tomcat is included only to allow quick migration
to the Enhydra product.  That is, one doesn't have to convert
JSP pages to some other format prior to installing the product;
Enhydra can be used immediately.

Mr. Young stated that Java code had to be intermingled with the
JSP pages, which made it quite difficult for web designers to
focus on the design without the ready assistance of a Java
programmer.

While I still do not know enough to address this for certain,
I am certain that a goal of JSP pages is to avoid intermingling
Java code with HTML.  Mixing the two is convenient, but not a
good idea.

I believe the solution to this is "tag libraries," but I do not
yet know enough about the proper way to do so.  I can say, though,
that the O'Reilly book on JavaServer Pages has been very helpful
in learning the technology; I expected the chapters on taglibs
to be illuminating as well.

   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jserverpages/


Enhydra itself
--------------

Mr. Young noted that development with Enhydra can begin using
only Enhydra itself.  That is, while there is a piece called
"Director" that can interface with Apache for production web
use, development can proceed using only Enhydra.  This is
similar to Tomcat, which includes a web server suitable for
HTML, servlet, and JSP development, but not for production.

The development environment even includes a functional database
system written in 100% Java, called Instant DB.  My understanding
is that Enhydra can access Image as well, whether through the
JDBC driver provided with the e3000 version of Java, or through
a third-party product such as ADBC (through AdvanceNet, IIRC).
If nothing else, Instant DB should enable one to determine
whether or not the Enhydra architecture is appropriate for
the intended project.

Enhydra, being an open-source project, is freely available for
download, though Lutris will be happy to provide a commercial
version and support for a fee.

While Enhydra was developed to use a command-line interface,
Mr. Young noted that this enables it to interface well with
current IDEs, including Borland's JBuilder.


Learning more
-------------

No doubt Lars, Jon Diercks, or several others can provide more
information on getting started with Enhydra.  There's also a
freely-available "getting started" guide on the Lutris web site,
available in both HTML and PDF formats.

   http://www.lutris.com/documentation/donations/index.html

There is also a web-based seminar on Enhydra co-sponsored by
HP this Thursday.  Apparently it will be geared more towards
HP resellers and developers, though all are welcome.  They
noted it was filling up fast, so if this interests you,
signing up sooner rather than later would be best.

   http://www.regsvc.com/lutris/enhydra/


Misc. thoughts
--------------

I've never used Enhydra.  I am very happy with JavaServer Pages
(on a 9000), though clearly I have much more to learn there.
Getting started with JSP was easy (once Tomcat was installed
and running), and development has proceeded quickly since the
release of Tomcat 3.2.

I have a little concern about the sheer size of Enhydra; large
packages generally mean much to learn.  Still, just because
something is there doesn't mean you have to use it.

In any case, though, I highly recommend starting *somewhere*.
Perl CGIs are relatively easy to understand, Perl itself is
quite usable outside the context of web pages, and there is
not much needed to get started.  However, site development and
maintenance is not nearly so easy as with JSP pages, though with
JSP there is more to install.  Perhaps Enhydra can take this a
step further.

It's interesting to note that if Enhydra were free but not
open source, it would be more difficult for me to consider,
given the open source nature of Tomcat, and the strong support
of a much larger company (Sun).


As a complete aside, Mr. Young also predicted that Macromedia's
Flash 5 will become the major web media presentation format.
This is because the Flash 5 client includes an XML parser, and
also because Flash uses vector-based graphics rather than
bitmapped images, which translates to scalable images and small
transfer sizes.  (With the explosion of broadband, size may not
be so much of an issue now.)

--Glenn, trying an on-topic post for a change ;)