JSP Performance & Support (concerns)

[leesiulung]

JSP/Servlets is far the most robust language available for dynamic sites. I have coded many sites in JSP, however, there are many things that have bothered me about JSP. It has even pushed me into considering other languaes like PHP and I don't feel like I have firm grasp of it.

Without further ado, here are my issues. Please respond with your opinion or idea:

1. Speed and lag time. This is a subjective and not necessarily true statement, but my experience shows that JSP sites are almost always slower than PHP sites. Everytime I go to JSP page it seems to take some time to load... Is this true? I can't find any numbers to back either one up, as the latest comparison I found was back in 2004... which showed JSP to be terribly slow. I know JSP has improved tremendously here and there are a lot of other factors involved.

2. Community support. Doing a search for JSP I found this forum and the official SUN forum. PHP has gazillions of sites and another gazillion sites showing you how to do just about anything. Is this everyones experience, not a lot of support for JSP?

3. Books. There are almost no new books for JSP and much worse, not that many good books available. What do you guys use to learn or as a reference for JSP?

4. Difficult deployment and tools . I spent a gazillion hours figuring out how to do things with WebSphere/DB2. Guess what, 6 months later I'm still trying to figure out how to use WebSphere... However, Tomcat isn't as bad. Finally, I opted for JSP hosting with GoDaddy instead, which apparently only deploys new apps once a day. Which brings me to the next one,

5. Not many reputable hosting companies host JSP/Servlets at a reasonable "cheap" price with excellent support like PHP.

So what, do you guys do for all these issues. I would love to embrace JSP/Servlets more as I love Java and to some extent C/C++ and hence might choose PHP. However, I have found that PHP not only NOT promote good programming practices, it promotes terribel programming practices!!

Let me know what your ideas are on these issues.

PS, I'm a new member and hope to join this growing community!

 

[prosper]

1. If there is a new JSP page and a user access it, the jsp will be compiled to servlet (You may need to wait more if the server is a old machine). This Jsp will not need to be recompiled for other user to access it. If you modify the JSP or you reload context, JSP will be needed to be compiled for the first time of access.
3. Book can help you to learn JSP. I think if you know more about building web site by php or asp, It can help you to use JSP. The architect of how web page work is similar. For example, you can use hidden field to save information, you can do this by using JSP or ASP.
4. Websphere is not a easy or beginner level application server. You need specific book to tell you how to use the interface of WSAD (The editor and development kit for websphere). There are also examples that can be downloaded from IBM website. Reb books are free to be downloaded too.
You also need to know Java well to use JSP in an effective and efficient way.