19 Feb 2004 (updated 19 Feb 2004 at 12:31 UTC)
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cactus: I
so wish I could agree with you about
Enemy at the Gates - but it was crud.
:-) The only bright spots were:
- Bob Hoskins IS Khrushchev - the role he was born to play!
- and Rachel Weisz. 'nuff said.
My biggest problem is I didn't know which side to root for. And neither did the screenwriter. Let's see... do I cheer THESE fascists, or THESE fascists? In Hollywood tradition, the suspense depended upon manipulative, circumstantial, episodic peaks and troughs, such as the hanging of the child-traitor. My favourite scene from the whole film, the only one I felt had a ring of reality about it - the grandfather and child shooting the wolf in the snow - was completely fictional, according to Russian friends familiar with Vassili's life story. Ed Harris' character was a two-dimensional caricature of a Nazi, who belonged to the Indiana Jones genre instead of a pretentious war film. I suggest anyone in the mood for a bleak WWII period piece should see The Pianist and avoid Enemy like the plague. Sorry, had to get that off my chest.
This [Helma Object Publisher] seems interesting:
Helma is a highly integrated open source web application platform that combines the strength of the Java platform with the power and simplicity of scripting languages. Server side scripting languages such as Perl and PHP have been a mainstay of the Web since the early days. But scripted Web apps have often proved to be less than well-designed and maintainable. Helma, which is scripted with standard JavaScript, was built to encourage clean and simple application design.
Why another scripting framework/application server?
Because, quite honestly, the one we need hasn't been built yet. What we need is a platform that offers a high level of abstraction on the prevalent web application concepts, but is not dumbed down and stripped of power and flexibility in order to be "idiot proof". The problem of so many J2EE solutions is that they are targeted to Java developers. But how many web developers you know sleep with the EJB spec under their pillow? That's what we thought. On the other hand, high level platforms often sacrifice the smart concepts in the underlying layers because their architects don't trust their users to be able to grasp those concepts. That's why JSP was patterened after Microsoft ASP when everybody doing serious web work already knew how broken that approach was.
Our credo is: Building websites should not be a task of system level programming. But when you bring web site building to the "ordinary people", they should be able to use the serious tools to get the job done. That's what we're trying to provide with Helma.