Comments on: Choosing a web development framework/toolkit

By: Srini

Srini — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:34:00 +0000

Very Good post & useful!

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:06:00 +0000

Great post, I couldn’t agree more about domain modeling. I discovered Grails recently and with its Hibernate support I was hopeful that the framework would be a complete solution, but alas it’s not nearly flexible enough in terms of separating persistence from your domain and creating a rich domain model.

By: Simon Palmer

Simon Palmer — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:16:28 +0000

I liked reading this post and the subsequent thread and I think I agree with much of what you said, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts publicly. How do you feel about your choice of Grails 6 or so months on? Has it continued to deliver benefit to you? Are there any obvious problems? Are you busy coding round any one particular aspect of the framework? I ask because I just took the decision to go Grails for a new project and am getting increasingly scared that it is unlikely to perform or scale. I have a lot of database design experience and I am suspending my disbelief that hibernate in its default GORM incarnation is going to get the queries right. I deliberately want an almost join-less database model and am already finding myself using composition to keep the code neat and the domain model sane. This does seem to cut against the Grails convention as you mentioned and I hate having to make my domain model and persistence model identical. Rather than that being an acceptable convention it feels like a naive restriction imposed by a Java framework team who may never have had to build really scalable database applications – but maybe that’s being a bit harsh. Incidentally I recently spent some time coding C for embedded devices after a long time in Java and Web frameworks. The key thing there is that everything fits inside 64k. Coming back to the incredibly wasteful world of normal programming makes me wonder when the framework fad will shed its obesity and free up all those CPU cycles that it spends doing stuff which made the programmer’s life easier.

By: Simon Palmer

Simon Palmer — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:16:00 +0000

By: web 2.0 development company

web 2.0 development company — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:08:42 +0000

there are many points things needed for to start web development . . . as you written you gotta done at all above in the article. . you just go ahead & start the journey of web development . .

By: web 2.0 development company

web 2.0 development company — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:08:00 +0000

there are many points things needed for to start web development . . . as you written you gotta done at all above in the article. . you just go ahead & start the journey of web development . .

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:18:19 +0000

I hear what you are saying Ilya. I don’t know that I’d want to hire someone with a little play time in multiple languages for my java based system over someone that has worked solidly in java but doesn’t have any experience in the others. It seems to me an expert in the language you are using is a far better choice than someone that knows it decently but also brings to the table a couple other languages which you don’t use. Oddly enough, in my early 20′s, when I had lots of energy and no kids, I loved learning new frameworks and languages. But, today it is a lot different… we have huge resources available to us via the internet, and I’ve barely tapped the Java language to know it’s full potential, let alone trying to spend time that I could (and should) be using on my day job learning a new language or two that I most likely won’t be able to use. By toy language I mean they are barely an itch in the industry compared to Java or .NET, and that so far most people I see using them often are the ones that didn’t care for Java or are tired of Java for one reason or another and want something new. Despite many sites popping up with php, ruby and python, they are still minuscule compared to the jobs available and sites built on java, or even .NET. I look at a couple of other things too. For example, iPhone’s language is objective C. Androids is Java. These two potentially huge platforms (iPhone already is and Android is fast on its way) chose these instead of languages like groovy, ruby, etc. I can’t help but ask, if Ruby, Python, Scala and these others are so much easier to use, faster to develop with, why not choose a language like this to write small phone apps over the larger robust languages? Maybe this isn’t a fair argument, but it does make me ask why the simpler faster languages were not chosen? See, back when there were a couple main languages, like assembly, pascal, c/c++ and java, they were all used quite in abundance…even Basic. But now, we have a crap load of “the next language to replace java” springing up, most of which are scripted languages not even compiling languages, and the few that use them rave about them and some how get a small following of people that jump aboard and hype it up as if it’s the next big thing. I see tons of blog posts about how scala will replace Java, how groovy is going to replace java, etc. Yet, nothing has come close. Even Ruby and PHP aren’t even close. They stand the most chance to make a fraction of a dent, but won’t ever come close. I honestly kind of get tired of seeing all the rants about having to learn all these languages. I have enough to do with Java and one job to keep me busy for years to come, and I truly love the language. I spent the time to learn a lot of it’s inner workings, to think about having to go do that all over again because a fraction of developers who are tired of Java for one reason or another (most of which have arguments that really aren’t that valid) say so I don’t know.. it just doesn’t seem like it’s necessary. Now, let’s say there was no ruby/rails, php, python, etc and some newer language, pure OO, cleaner syntax, etc came out, it might be worth looking in to if it really offered something better. But I haven’t seen any argument yet that indicates any of these languages are better or offer anything more than what Java does already. The biggest argument is speed of development. Hmm.. copy/paste of tried/tested code works for me. Java is a well understood language, with tons and tons of money and sharp minds behind it, using it. I don’t see anything Ruby, PHP or any other language offers me that is better than what Java does. It’s almost like the “If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it” analogy. Java comes on every OS out there now, Ruby and PHP do not. I know that anything I write in Java will almost always run on any of the OSes out there out of the box (give or take the few that aren’t updated to 1.6 yet.. thankfully OSX finally is.. but 1.5 is still there), I can’t say the same for any other language out there except maybe C. I could probably go on all day. You did make a good point.. to me php and ruby are very similar to perl and I only dabbled in perl. Like I said in my first post, I find the language syntax to be confusing and hard to read. Maybe it takes time.. but every developer blog I read about these languages raves about how fast and easy it is to develop in, and I don’t consider myself a beginner developer but after looking at source and reading a book on Ruby, I still find it hard to work with and cryptic to read. Maybe my mind is stuck in the Basic/C/Pascal/Java like code style, but they make sense to me. These others ones are strange to look at and remind me highly of shell scripting and perl, neither of which I care for. lol.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:18:00 +0000

By: Ilya Sterin

Ilya Sterin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:28:48 +0000

Kevin, I have dabbled in ruby/python frameworks for a bit before forming my opinions. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in them and wouldn’t necessarily say that my mind wouldn’t change if I’ve used one of them for quite a while. Ruby or Python didn’t seem foreign to me, hey, I was a Perl guy before Java To say that these languages are toys is pretty uninformed to be honest, they are true proven languages. Perl’s probably running as many if not more production critical systems than java, it’s just not as hyped any more. Amazon’s store front is mostly written in perl. Python powers lots of google’s infrastructure and PHP powers yahoo, so not sure what you mean by toy languages. Now with that said, most good programmers learn different languages even if their day job doesn’t allow them to use it. New ideas, ways of thinking, etc… are spawned through learning different languages and frameworks. I’d much rather hire someone who’s worked in a heterogenous environment, understands the concepts and is not proficient in a particular language we’re looking for, than to get someone who only programs in Java and uses it’s echosystem. There is no doubt that java and it’s libraries are probably the most stable and sufficient frameworks for developing enterprise apps, but you also must look at other factors. Thankfully with the advent of other languages running on the JVM, you now have a choice. I wrote up a piece a few weeks ago on Groovy SQL builders for example. I could have also done it in Java, but what a pain it would have been. Now, to say that we want to save a few lines (actually many lines) of code, is true. But I don’t see anything wrong with it. That’s the nature of computer science, building abstractions, otherwise we’d be writing code in assembly and telling java developers how dare they want to save a few lines of code. There are times when it’s important to understand the lower level details, there are times when it’s not as important. Now, even if I do understand it, I wouldn’t say I’d really want to say parse raw HTTP packets, even though I’ve rather familiar with them. I’d rather the framework take care of that for me. The same is true for other cross cutting concerns. If we can get an abstraction to take care of it for us, more power to the abstraction. Yes, there are side cases when you have to get dirty into the implementation details, but with good abstractions, these should be far and between. There are of course “leaky abstractions”, which I still think are beneficial, they just expose the underlying problems with what we’re trying to abstract. I love java, i’ve programmed java for the last 10 years, but with that said Java is not the end all of software development. There are better suitors for particular problems. Like Erlang or Scala for distributed and multi threaded programming (have you even tried multi-threaded programing with java’s thread primitives? If you’ve ever developed any serious multithreaded app in java, you’ll know that it’s super hard, it’s non-deterministic, and because of that it’s bug prone even when you tested the heck out of it). You also have Groovy, which brings some level of dynamic programming to Java. I don’t particularly love groovy, but I like it’s interop with java. Also, Clojure looks awesome for functional abstractions and multi-core concurrency through STM.

By: Ilya Sterin

Ilya Sterin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:28:00 +0000