Where does it leave us? At the moment, with a very useful though far from ideal open source web toolkit, with an uncertain future regarding how closely it tracks the Oracle version. It provides you with the nuts, bolts, wrenches etc that help you build your engine but does absolutely nothing to help you with the question as to whether or not that engine will fit next year's chassis...
I'm OK with that, for now. It's far from ideal, but it's still far better than starting from scratch when you build a site.
I think part of the problem is that Philip is such a good writer, and among other things talks about bringing software engineering to the web, etc, that expectations are raised to the point where the reality is a bit depressing.
The thing that annoys me the most is that apparently the CS curriculum at MIT includes a course entitled "testing is a sin". If it's not broke, it's not software. I'm about to go off to fix the 3.2.1 administration page for news, which is totally hosed (I'm working with the Oracle version, today, too) and has obviously not been tested with a fresh installation...grrr...puts me in a bad mood.
