Bruce,

I am focused on working with the data...Oracle. So I asked one of our programmers. He said they use tools like Dreamweaver to generate the pages. They use Java as the middle piece to access Oracle. And he claimed that accessing data is one of Java's strongpoints.

If you have any particular questions, I'd be more than happy to run them by the programmers for you.

Perry

>PMFJI - that's the rough opinion I have of Java currently too. But it may be a fine language/tool in the right developer hands. The problem seems to getting the right hands and/or the right tasks to use it on.
>
>We have one Intranet app done in Java by contractors, it's a fairly simple 8-page or so app that does mainly optiongroup/dropdown/listbox interface for querying a Sybase backend. The queries themselves are okay, but it's just an atrocious front-end. Extremely slow (as in read your newspaper between *every* mouse click), and very buggy. If you do more than a few simple tasks, the web pages distort and then disappear and you have to restart IE and login again. New contractors have failed to improve it much...
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>No one will attempt a Java app here for a long while after that bad apple - as I say, it may be no reflection on Java itself, but rather the type of interface and/or the quality of the developers that are accessible by the gov't pay standards.
>
>So, what would you think is the cause of such problems in a Java-built app?