If you don’t like reading rants, stop reading now. This is definitely a rant.

I used to wonder where bad programmers get some of their idiotic ideas. Some of them are just too involved or fly too much in the face of common-sense for the average code-monkey to come up with them on their own. Surely, someone is dispensing this cr*p as good advice.

Eventually, I started seeing the cr*p peddlers everywhere. Now I know.

The latest example that I saw was an article on TechRepublic, titled “10 JSP Tag Libraries No Programmer Should Be Without”.  It’s from 2007, but I just saw it today.

Several of the tag libraries that the article recommends are fine, but several are just bad ideas.

For instance, the article recommends the Mailer taglib from tha Jakarta-Taglib project. It’s from Apache, so it must be good stuff, right?

Also recommended in the article is the JDBFforms taglib.

What’s wrong with these?

Well, the last time that I checked, JSPs were a display technology. You know, the “V” in MVC. When did sending email and accessing a database become things that are proper to implement in the view tier?

Ok, so now I know where bad programmers get their “good” ideas. Places like TechRepublic and Apache, apparently.