Java + Tomcat + Lucene
Well, after getting over my instinctive hate of the word “CLASSPATH,” I have successfully integrated the Lucene JAR file (ugh, it’s hard to type this stuff) and Tomcat. I don’t have any real API magic going on, but I’ve imported the class and declared an object associated with the Lucene package.
This is all pretty impressive, given the small amount of time, effort, and background information I have contributed to this effort. It’s all pretty intuitive, pretty close to ASP. I was a little miffed that the import directive isn’t permitted inside a JSP scriptlet (it apparently has to be in a page directive).
They can take their “page directive” and shove it, but hey, it works. It kind of makes sense, anyway.
Java is so flexible, so adaptable. I posit that it is too flexible. Hence the propensity of the language to generate “toolkits,” “frameworks,” and “taglibs.” Sure, some of it is simply the maturity of the J2EE/J2SE (don’t ask me to explain the distinction… I still haven’t found a good article defining this) platform, but a lot of it is just the giant cluster that is Java.
What these toolkits are doing are simplifying the platform by restricting motion within it, dialing down the degrees of freedom. Heck, it took me an hour or two of reading to understand what a servlet was in comparison to JSP. Come on.
Anyway, this is cool, and I’m hoping to do some development with the platform. We’ll see.