Things seem to have moved at unprecedented speed, especially given the fact that I'm ill with a leg ulcer at the moment, but my new World of Warcraft quest guides site has just gone live at Ged's Guide to World of Warcraft.
In truth it's not nearly finished yet, but it's useable and the basic functionality is there so there's no reason why people shouldn't be able to use it and, I hope, have their enjoyment of the game increased, however slightly. I'm hoping that by releasing it early I can get feedback from users that will prevent me from making mistakes I might have made and allow me to do things I might never have thought of.
It turned out that the folks at positiveinternet didn't move quickly enough for whatever reason, and so the site is currently hosted, albeit on a monthly rolling contract, by the good folks at jsp-servlet.net.
It's not that easy to get a hosting provider that knows what they are doing with Java technology, certainly at the cheap end of the market, and I spent a lot of time looking at the various offerings. Many seem to focus on jsps rather than servlets, and a common theme is that you can only have a single web app deployed, which goes into the root of your home directory. That just doesn't seem acceptable to me for anything other than the most trivial site. For a start, I'd never even consider putting any maintenance or management functions into the public web application either, so the most likely motif would be a pair of web apps for each game supported, along the lines of /wow and /wow-admin. And if gedsguides.com ever takes off, it will end up catering to more than one gaming community, so there's scope for several WAR deployments right there. Although I expect that by that time we'd actually have moved to at least a virtual private server if not a dedicated box, so the argument becomes a little moot.
As well as the aptness of the facilities offered, there's also the question of the currency of the software supported, and here also standards generally seem to have been lamentable. Certainly much more than half of the jsp/servlet-aware hosters I found were offering Tomcat 4.x instead of 5.x, and I think that that is just not on, two years or so after servlet 2.4 and jsp 1.2 came out. Again, about half were using JDK 1.4.x instead of 1.5.x. It's obvious that for most providers, it's a question of offering whatever is current on the Linux distribution they chose for their OS, and this means that while their PHP support is relatively up to date, their jsp/servlet support is relatively out of date. That's a shame, but I suppose it does increase the size of the niche market enjoyed by the java support specialists.
Time to stop rambling and get coding.
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