Why Don't We Hear More About GNU Server Pages (GSP)?

Ozten asks: "I am currently looking at GSP and trying to convince the big e-commerce company that I work for that Open Source technology doesn't mean more maintenance than large packages on the market, such as Blue Martini or IBM Websphere. I am looking for facts and firepower on GNU Server Pages, but info is sparse except for bit mechanics and its links. You would think that with a high profile site like the Star Wars Shop using GSP, it would get more notice. Any other facts out there? GSP seems like the best free software since gnu-SlicedBread, where is the hype?" Actually, I would like more facts than hype. With production sites using this technology, I would be interested in hearing how well the things have held up, in addition to any advantages and disadvantages over popular solutions like ASP.

Hmm..

[The Madpostal Worker]

its most likely beacuse GSP is really advertised with Apache Jserv(a rather old product). JServ is soon to be replaced by Tomcat which offers JSP and servles support. Also in the domain off cool server side technologies, check out Cocoon( its part of the apache project). You can completely seperate logic, content, and style. GSP isnt that bad of a product(its an implementation of JSP), just thats its a little bit fragile.

/*
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/

Dead technology

[Matts]

Because this technology is totally wrong, and pretty much unsupported. JSP 1.1 is better, but even that is not nearly as nice as the really new technologies coming from Cocoon and AxKit (link below).

Yes, I'm biased, but I truly believe that the next generation web site will have to think about a lot more than just generating dynamic content quickly. And these products implement both dynamic and static content using separate presentation logic in a sensible manner.

Never used it or heard of it until now

[alienalchemy.com]

I can't say much about GSP I just checked it out now for the first time. I'm open to all sorts of new ideas and tech but then I have the freedom to experiment so i'll play around with it and see what it's strengths are. As far as Server Pages go in general though I still can't see why everyone doesn't use PHP to develop them (The ONLY reason I can possibly see that people will use ASP is that they don't, can't and/or won't write their own code). It is THE best solution I have found to date and far better than ASP plus it's not that hard to configure to run on Windows NT Servers if you really have to run your web server on NT.

Because there are so many other solutions...

[elefantstn]

I imagine the reason there is so little heard about GSP is because there are so many other solutions that are familiar and work well for people...and not just proprietary solutions, either. There are open source implementations of Java Server Pages, which appeals to the Java development community, not to mention PHP. Both of these are tried and tested by tons of sites. BTW, if you're looking for an application server that's open source, check out Enhydra [enhydra.org], an OSS Java/XML server that can run standalone or as a servlet.

Why do you want to use them instead of WebSphere?

[woggo]

This is not a flame; I'm merely trying to be pragmatic here.

Probably the reasons you don't hear more about them is that the last release was in February, 1999 and the bitmechanic guys haven't IPOed since. Don't get me wrong, I love open source stuff and use it whenever possible. Furthermore, the guys at bitmechanic have written some absolutely brilliant Java stuff (like ConnectionPool -- wow!).

The sad fact is, though, that unlike many open source/Free projects, no one is selling support for GSP. Your "big e-commerce company" surely has a lot of bucks to throw at IBM, WebSphere is a great product, and IBM has a lot of smart people working for them who will

• write comprehensive documentation
• answer developer questions

An e-commerce company is losing money even when their site is up :-), so they certainly can't afford to have it go down. Probably paying extra for the assurance that there is a company to beat on in the event of a problem is worth it to your managers. (If someone were selling support for GSP, then you'd have a better case.)

The documentation issue goes much further beyond "I'd like some javadoc that tells me what the paramaters to foo() mean", too. So much of this industry's labor force is consultants, which unfortunately can (not necessarily does) mean two things: short-term and underqualified. So if you're the GSP guru and you leave, your managers are up a creek to get it fixed by the clod that Skimmer Consulting Agency sends them to replace you. That's double if you've changed the code or made extensions. I am always shocked at the incapacity of many consultants to understand other people's code, no matter how well factored it it. (I'm a consultant myself, so I'm not just bashing here.) On the other hand, Skimmer Consulting Agency can easily send your bosses someone who at least ostensibly knows something about WebSphere pretty easily. Whether or not they admit it to you, that's a consideration, too.


Good luck!
~wog

It's obsolete

[aboyko]

Although GSP was a nice implementation of an early Java Server Pages spec (0.92, I think), the current JSP language is significantly different. Since JSP 1.0 & 1.1 are widely supported by open source systems, including Apache's jakarta-tomcat [apache.org] and Caucho's Resin [caucho.com] (which both completely rock), GSP seems like a poor choice for any new development.

Another problem is that GSP was written to the Servlet 2.0 spec, and fails to run under 2.1/2.2 compliant servlet runners. If you have to run JSPs within a servlet 2.0 environment (like apache jserv), look at gnujsp [klomp.org], which is largely JSP 1.0 compatible.