The developers and engineers of Else For If are dedicated to producing quality Web software that will improve the state of the art and, at the same time, make it easier and cheaper for people to get their ideas onto the Web. During the past decade, we have built many types of Web sites, corporate intranets, expert online systems, experimental and not-for-profit sites. In the process, and with a critical eye, we have adopted or invented methodogies toward building stable and robust Web sites with minimum effort, so that we can focus on the details and the logic of the site itself, how it speaks and what it says.

We develop systems, based on the Java programming language, for building data-driven, highly configurable Web sites rapidly. This includes an object-relational layer that simplifies the coupling of RDBMS persistence with Java-based user interfaces of all types. The language itself, used well, allows for advanced customization of each Web site's behavior, so that maintenance is cheap and bugs are few. This affords us freedom of movement, in effect a versatile methodology for doing what we love.

Our support libraries enable us to construct a very flexible interface in a relatively short time, a modular system that allows many parts to be modified without disrupting the whole. Read on for a glance under the hood of this site or an introduction to some of our current projects.

Many of our Web sites are written with Java servlets. After having worked extensively with ASP and JSP, we have found that as programmers, we can do more without them. Although some projects require them or a similar technology because of staffing limitations, most of our colleagues agree JSPs are cumbersome and difficult to maintain, comparatively, and they do little to enforce the design structure they claim to foster. Frameworks like Struts enhance that structure but also add complexity to an already complex and awkward interface.

By using pure servlets, we can rely upon built-in linguistic features (as extension) to produce a far more coherent design, easier to build, easier to maintain, and also more aesthetic (we feel that matters). Consider the site you're now reading, which took about a week to build. As a relatively simple Web site with no real dynamic content, it exemplifies our approach to HTML output. Built upon our existing code base, this site required only a handful of Java classes (see below), the images that appear on the home page, a JavaScript file and a CSS file. That's the extent of it. We use our own custom version of the jikes compiler to include blocks of pure HTML in our Java source where appropriate, since in many cases, that is the most natural and understandable form.

Here follow links to all the source files that make up this site per se. (Look for the <% and %> tags delimiting blocks of HTML code in these classes):

• ElseForIfServlet.java - a custom base class for servlets
• Main.java - the home page
• Products.java - the "Products" page
• Services.java - the "Services" page
• Development.java - the "Development" page
• Contact.java - the "Contact" page
• ContactEmail.java - a control servlet for sending emails
• ElseForIfHTMLWriter.java - a facilitator for producing page content
• URLs.java - a few URL constants

If you're programmer, you may be wondering where is all our error handling. Because pure servlets can build upon a common superclass, we can declare our service methods to throw any Exception and then wrap them in a catch-all error handler in that superclass. This helps relieve servlet implementations of undue responsibilty. Hence, ElseForIfServlet extends a more general class, JVCServlet, which provides a default error handling mechanism. (Subclasses, of course, are free to override such mechanisms as needed.)

This design avoids many of the difficulties that JSPs introduce. Which is not to say JSP does not provide good solutions, just that there are always alternatives.

Brain-op aims to be a popular forum for inquiries on any subject whatsoever. The "op" stands for "operation", or an open co-op of minds.

The basic idea is to both answer and ask questions, in a simple, cooperative fashion. This is not a business effort but a simple attempt to speed the general flow of knowledge using modern technologies. Typical "forum" sites allow for more or less general conversation, according to their various rules of decorum. This is fine, but it tends to obscure the matter at hand, whatever that may be, making it hard to find answers in much of what Google can produce.

Which brings us to a greater problem: most forums are specialized, restricting them to a limited audience. The venerable Usenet newsgroups, and other popular sites, are exceptions; but they are also more chaotic and less likely places to find specialized knowledge. So, we find ourselves turning with questions first to colleagues, then to special-interest mailing lists and forums, and at last to general discussion sites.

Brain-op is based on the assumptions that the basic social utility and purpose of these sites is to share knowledge, and that only structure is wanted to bridge the general to the specialized. With critical mass, it hopes to become a central and efficient exchange of ideas. See this page for more information.

This is Mr. Van Cleve's own developmental playground (read: under constant construction). It showcases some of the applets we can produce, as well as JavaScript animations, etc. Some of the site's content will require user access privileges, for which you'll have to email the webmaster. But this page may link you to something of interest.

Most of the site has been converted to XHTML 1.0. It requires a reasonably advanced browser--and Java, if you want to play with the applets!