Two years of Java is 20 years of Fortran.
- We started with Jigsaw from W3C as a Web server/servlet container
in 1999. Cumbersome administration via GUI. Unacceptable if you
work in a distributed team: Columbus, Dayton, Syracuse. You cannot
really use export DISPLAY=some.machine:0.0
routinely since it is awfully slow (it requires that actual pixels
are sent via net).
- We moved to Apache JServ servlet engine in 2000. Still no JSP, only
servlets, i.e., ugly out.println("<p>Your
HTML line goes here...");. It was Servlet Specification 2.0
(JSDK2.0). This was much better, since you could just edit
text config files like: httpd.conf and
jserv.conf to change configuration.
- Tomcat (3.0) and Jakarta arrived in 2000. At this point, Tomcat
(version 3.0) did not support SSL and its Web serving capabilities were
very rudimentary (e.g., no logging, MIME types worked erratically,
no CGI or SSI). We ran Tomcat as a servlet/JSP container behind
Apache. Tomcat supported servlet specification
2.2 (i.e., web application concept, context path, and web.xml deployment descriptor), and Java Server Pages
version 1.1. JSP allowed us to produce easily server based dynamic
pages and supported scriplets, and tag libraries, and all other goodies.