Java 1, Colin 0

So, I have been working on my personal pet project for a few weeks now, and decided (after a fair bit of consulting with friends and co-workers) on which language to tie it to a database. I picked JSPs. It seemed like a good choice -- something I could grow into, but with new libraries like JSTL I could manage the learning curve.

bzzz!

To make a really boring story condense into one paragraph, the installers worked fine, but I could never understand how to initiate a database connection. And there in lies the small opening that I realized that Java was the wrong language for me: as I started digging to find out what was involved, I started having to learn more and more. First there was the JSTL libraries, then there was JDBC, which then lead me into JNDI. Argh! All I wanted to do was open a database connection! But since this is Java, it is all about objects, so the preferred method is to abstract out the actual database and give it a name (JNDI) and then make all of your database calls through a platform-agnostic layer (JDBC) which makes so much sense from an application standpoint but it means a crapload of setup for just a return of tables in a query.

So I have thrown in the towel.

And started down the path of PHP.

I returned one of the two JSP books that I had bought (I had written my name on the other one in my fervor to lay claim to Java as my technology of choice) and bought a few books on PHP. The downside is that I don't really have anyone I can go to for help, but that didn't seem to make that much of a difference on this project.

(Technical books always seem to get me in the same place: the first 80 pages is a breeze. Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it, knew that already, blah blah. And then, there is a section of about 4 pages that just whizzes right past me. No matter how much re-reading or going back a over the basic chapters contains the Rosetta stone for me to decipher it. The authors talk with such glib ease: "And now just establish a database connection with the following code" not bothering to really go into the detail that I need to figure out how to troubleshoot when it goes so horribly awry. Sigh. I feel so retarded, that my brain can't make that transition between the abstract beginning chapters and those critical steps when you actually try to make the technology work.)