For over six years I have worked with customers who wanted to develop web applications in Java. Sounds easy? Well it is much more difficult than it should be. Normally companies like Sun continue to preach that in order to start with Java it is necessary to learn the complete J2EE platform. I disagree. Instead, we do need a new way to teach java in small steps.

Java is a great language for experienced programmers. It gives you a lot of freedom and there are many different ways to solve a single problem. This is great but liberty comes at a price. In this case, the price is confusion and complexity for novice developers. They normally start learning the Java language and stumble on the first complexity, Threads. Why do we keep insisting that everyone who wants to write JSPs has to learn about Threads? Then they learn about servlets, which is nice but really unnecessary since once they start writing JSPs they will, in most cases never write a servlet again. Finally, they are told that they need to adopt a framework that will help them implement a MVS model and it takes them another week or so to learn. Why are we surprised that so many people keep using Perl, PHP or Microsoft technologies to build web applications when there are better alternatives in the Java world. What we really need is an easy entry path to Java web programming.

It is with that goal in mind that I wrote the storm library. The idea is that beginners start benefitting from the beginning from the object-oriented design of Java by using components in their Java Server Pages. In order to facilitate the task of creating tags, Storm provides two foundation tags that can be easily extended to create new tags in an easy and consistent way. No java is allowed inside the JSPs to enforce strict separation of the presentation and the business logic layers. By defining strict rules that are easy to follow, beginners are able to produce results very quickly. In my experience, a three day long workshop is enough for most beginners. After that, they are ready to start writing their own applications. It is true that they will not have learned about EJBs, JNDI and other important J2EE APIs but they will be able to learn those later. Most of those I have tought Java using Storm now use EJBs from their own custom tags. I f they had not been successful using Java from the very beginning, now they would be using other technologies, and that would not have been good for the J2EE platform

The Storm custom tag library is an open-source project that will be hosted on sourceforge. Additional material, such as training classes and documentation will be made available on this site later.

I have created the stormtags project on Slashdot. The source files will be available shortly.

If you want to learn quickly what storm is about, take a look at the online demos.