Susan and I went to a computer auction Saturday and picked up a few interesting odds and ends. Live auctions are strange; they can be really boring sometimes and a lot of fun other times. But eBay is a lot more convenient most of the time.

All the work with JSP and servlets that I’ve been doing for one of my clients lately has gotten me interested in using them myself. I’ve got a development box set up with Tomcat and have been fooling around with it for a few days. It actually looks like one could implement a portal site like Slashdot or Advogato pretty easily using Java servlets. I’ve found a really cool HTML template scripting language that seems much better than JSP, called WebMacro. It allows you to completely seperate the Java code from the HTML markup so the web designers don’t have to know programming and the programmers don’t have to do page design. There’s a nice article about some of the problems with JSP by the WebMacro author over at servlets.com.