Roundabout two years ago I decided to get rid of Wordpress and the full stack of PHP and MySQL. About my reasons for this decision I’ve blogged here. As a result I decided to write my own simple blog solution: Uberblog. This was a weekend project which served me well, until I decided to reinstall my root server from scratch. Then the hassle with Ruby, Gems and dependency versions started. It was so much fiddling to get these quite simple Ruby scripts running again with their dependencies. It was the same pain I had years of my live with PHP and Pear. I also had these type of setup problems recently with Perl and it’s CPAN. I don’t want to bash these languages and dependency management tools to much. But they are not really convenient. You need to have special knowledge and you have to dig deep inside to get it up and running in a reliable way. That’s a problem if you only want to hack together some scripts, and then years later you need to reinstall them. So I decided to rewrite Uberblog with a language which compiles into a self contained binary. So a enduser who want to use the tool do not need to tinker around with an environment he is not familiar with.
My choice was Java. Why? Because you can build a final JAR file containing everything. There is no need to install anything else than a JVM on your machine. And these JVMs are available for almost all platforms. And also strong argument for me: I work as a Java developer since some years, so it would be a good practice. Alas I’m not finished with that project. I took me more time and effort than expected. So that’s the reason why I decided to give Jekyll and GitHub a try as interim solution until I’ve finished my own solution.