2006-03-21 #1

CGI in Japanese and >10 Years since Java

It looks like my book on CGI programming was translated to Japanese. How come I didn’t know about this until now and shouldn’t there be a cheque for me somewhere?

It has been ten years since that book was published. I remember how just as I was finishing up my part of the book, Sun released their HotJava browser with its support for Applets. I was crestfallen. I figured that this meant that my book would be obsolete before it was even published. Who would want to do stupid batch-processing CGI programming when you could have rich-client GUI Applets instead? I would never have believed that in ten years we would still all be doing what is essentially CGI programming; but with the only difference being that we would be using Java on the server-side rather than Perl or C. It's like we took lemon-aid and made lemons.