Less, a leaner CSS

Re:Less, a leaner CSS by mosburger on Tuesday June 16, 2009 @07:05PM (#661065)

No one makes any stuff like this for Java. Java has lost the wind from its sails. Java has been relegated to beige cubicles and enterprise solutions.

I say this as a disheartened Java programmer. I've recently been involved in a Rails project and a couple of Django projects, and then jumped back into Java. The difference in energy is amazing. Who would make something like this for Java? What would its success path be? Acceptance into an Apache incubator and then into "Commons?" Spec JSR-123987 finally being accepted by Sun/Oracle five years after its written?

I know this isn't a new revelation and I'm far from the first person to bemoan the stale, slow death of Java - but I'm sitting at an airport terminal with nothing better to do, and it's raining out, I'm depressed, and probably shouldn't be posting to HN. :)

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Re:Less, a leaner CSS by revetkn on Tuesday June 16, 2009 @08:50PM (#661190)

Check out GWT's CssResource support, which is a much more powerful version of Less backed by a real compiler instead of a collection of regexes: http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/wiki/CssResource

I agree that most of the Java web bits (including pretty much all the popular web frameworks) are, for lack of a better term, enterprisey crap. It saddens me a bit that GWT isn't more popular - there's a lot of innovation and power there that gets ignored simply because the framework's written in Java. IMHO, Rails and Django et al are just kind of standard web MVC frameworks that happen to be implemented on fun-to-write languages: the only thing out there that has the real "right" approach to web _application_ dev is GWT, which is fundamentally difference from all the rest (per the Google Maps/Wave team, Wave would not have been possible without GWT).

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Re:Less, a leaner CSS by mosburger on Wednesday June 17, 2009 @11:41AM (#661975)

I've never tried GWT. I'll be sure to check it out, thanks for the recommendation.

The most "fun" Java web development framework, IMHO, is Stripes. I think what sets it apart is the lack of enterprisey crap - it's simplicity is refreshing, but it's still powerful enough to be useful.

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Re:Less, a leaner CSS by zmimon on Wednesday June 17, 2009 @11:49PM (#662971)

You're a little harsh. It sounds like you're looking back at the old places you left from java and guest what ... they're old ... everyone left, just like you did. In the meantime though the Java language has moved on and become the JVM platform and there's plenty of energy in it. Take a look at Grails, for an example. And there are new modern Java frameworks as well (someone else mentioned Stripes, and I agree with them).

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