[java] Want to creat a forum

Personally, I wouldn't touch ASP because it locks you in to Windows platforms. Other than that, I have no advice on it because I've never used it .

In your question, you listed JSP and servlets independently. While it would be possible to code a forum (or any webapp) using only JSP or only servlets, you cen get much more flexibility by using both. I would recommend doing research on Model 2 development (a term used in the j2ee community to describe a pattern very similar to MVC [Model,View,Controller]). The basic idea is that one or more servlets act as the controller(s), custom classes (beans) handle the logic and manipulate the data (model), and JSP (or another presentation technology) renders the view. Using only JSP, your code becomes a mess with all of the business logic being mixed in with the presentation code. With only servlets, it's a pain to handle all of the out.println( ) statements you need to print render the pages.

I'm currently working as a j2ee developer, and I very much like it. So I'm probably more than a bit biased here However, for a personal site, unless you have your own server setup, j2ee hosting options are limited. The free ones (I only know of 2) offer very little web space and limited (if any) database space. As far as commercial hosts, most are rather pricey. However, LunarPages is cheap and appears to provide excellent support, based upon what I read in their forums. Lots of options to take advantage of for the price, and uptodate j2ee software. I've been evaluating hosts recently for my personal site, and will be moving to Lunarpages when my current lease runs out.

If you must have a free or very low cost host, then you may want to consider PHP. There are several opensource PHP forums out there already which you can study (the only servlet-based opensource forum I know of is the MVNForum). And most hosts these days, free or otherwise, offer some version of PHP. THe installed features vary from host to host of course. In the end though, you have a wider range of choices with PHP, both platform-wise and host-wise.


[edited by - aldacron on May 19, 2003 5:51:20 AM]

Thankyou.
I am taking your advise seriously and will develope on that basis.
lunarpages is looking good to me too.But I would like to give some sites that I recently thought about:
http://www.powweb.com/
http://web-hosting.candidinfo.com/
(this is Indian but servers are hosted outside)

Also try searching in Google "India web Hosting" for very cheap but good servers mostly for java technologies.