Don Park: “Sash is Trash”

Posted on January 2, 2003

So Don Park is saying on his blog that IBM’s Sash technology is, well, trash — too hard to install, too bloated, too complicated.

Maybe he’s right — I never had the chance to use Sash on a production project, so I dunno. But I have done some noodling around with it, and many of the things he disliked, I liked — particularly the IDE, which is powerful and robust. Park thinks it’d be better if Sash let you write apps just with a text editor, and says the Sash IDE leans too far in the other direction, trying to be like Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Well, I liked using Visual Studio back when I was a VB developer, so from my perspective that’s not much of a strike against Sash. In fact, my reaction when I first tried Sash out was “Wow, an IDE with lots of the nice things from Visual Studio — and it’s free!” Funny how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, I suppose 🙂