Glenn, first of all, thank you for the incredible write-up.  At least I
can say
one person paid close attention ;)  Actually, I think we all had a
pretty good
time.

couple of comments on your (excellent) notes....
1. James H. Young is much better looking than I am.  But I didn't see
him
there ;)

2. Kinko's used Enhydra as the basis for a number of large projects to
support b2b services.  One in particular gives users the ability to
produce
documents on line for reproduction at Kinko's stores.  It was also
installed
in all Kinko's stores to process the conversion of photos into images
which
were then hosted by Kinko's for 30 days.  Yes, there are _much_ larger
installations of Enhydra at other corporations.  Rumor has it that
Information
Week may review some of them in the near future.

3. There is an excellent review of Lutris Enhydra 3.5 , which
incorporates
100% of the open source Enhydra 3.1 source code.  LE 3.5 is the version
that HP and Lutris have announced will be certified for the e3000.  The
review from WebTechniques magazine is at:
 http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/03/progrevu/
BTW, I wrote an article on wireless design with xmlc (versus jsp) which
appeared in their January issue:
 http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/02/young/

4. Regarding Taglibs... yes, they approach the goal of separating
html from java... however, the implementor is left to their own approach

to defining that separation.  The result is that company A is likely to
pick
a different approach than company B.  Since it is a native interface for

how xmlc approaches this, it's done the same way no matter who uses
it.   I smell an article for a future LE Journal...

5. Regarding the "sheer size of enhydra," it is extremely small
actually.
It has a 30M or so footprint... which is infinitesimal compared to
competitors.
Also, as you'll see in the review, the doc makes it very easy to ramp up
with.

6. Enhydra and Tomcat... Hopefully, I didn't come off as flippant as it
sounds about Tomcat in Enhydra.  Chalk it up to some marketing arrogance

on my part if it came off that way.  Combiningg tomcat development with
the
graphical debug admin console of enhydra multiserver makes for a very
powerful
open source development environment.

7.  On my Flash prediction... the _real_ advantage of the vector
strategy that
Flash 5 uses is how it will apply to the exploding world of variable
presentation
real estate.  Bandwidth is not the issue, though it loads much faster
and more
conveniently than Java applets.  It's all about giving application
developers the
ability to support the growing multitude of variable screen sizes that
are being
thrown at us by all those mobile, pda OEMs.

Again, I always have fun hanging out with the HP audience.

David

"COLE,GLENN (Non-HP-SantaClara,ex2)" wrote:

> 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 ;)

--
David H. Young
Chief Evangelist
Lutris Technologies, Inc.
1200 Pacific Avenue, Suite 300
Santa Cruz, CA 95060 USA
831.460.7310; 831.471.9754 (fax)
http://www.lutris.com
http://www.enhydra.org