Debating web development toolsets

[Andrej Marjan]

On January 7, 2008 04:08:45 pm Ian Petersen wrote:
>
> Java is just a beast.  I'm struggling right now with a Java EE
> application fronted by a GWT interface (GWT is the Google Web
> Toolkit--it compiles Java source to Javascript for running in the
> browser).  It's taken me a long time to understand the ins and outs of
> running an application inside an application server like JBoss.  The
> little things like the difference between a session bean, a persistent
> bean, and a message-oriented bean are easy to understand, but
> configuring the container to host your application is a twisty maze of
> documentation, all alike.  I think Java EE probably has a good
> scalability story and there are components to do all sorts of legacy
> integration things, but it's not an easy framework to understand.  In
> my experience, building a web app on Java teaches you how to wrangle
> app servers instead of how to build a web app.

I think this is an important criterion when thinking about greenfield 
projects: the deployment model. Java's deployment model runs from sort of OK 
(pure JSP on tomcat, but that's so ugly you may as well write in PHP or 
something) to sacrificing virgins (WebSphere). 

Also, many Java frameworks seem to be written by and for Java developers who 
are afraid of the web and who want to pretend they're living in 
middleware-land where they can happily ignore the realities of HTTP, URLs, 
etc. Most Java web people I've met are either ignorant of or very hostile to 
REST.

PHP's deployment model is a dream (in contrast to the language itself ;).

Rails is a pretty nice framework, but its deployment story is not so nice. At 
least, not so nice if you need to run many small apps on a single server. 

Python: no definitive model -- everything from CGI to standalone app server, 
depending on preference/framework/etc.

ASP.NET: pretty easy on Windows, no idea about Mono + Apache. 

If you use the built-in webforms GUI library, then the development model is 
actually pretty nice for a certain class of apps, IFF you use Visual Studio. 
Otherwise I think it'd be quite painful. People have used the low level 
plumbing of ASP.NET and written their own GUI libraries on top. For instance, 
govtrack.us runs on Mono and a custom XSLT-based framework that replaces 
webforms. There are also Rails-like MVC and ActiveRecord libraries for .NET 
out there, but I don't know if they run on Mono. 

As an aside, aren't there other Ruby web frameworks out there, besides Rails? 
Does anyone use those?
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