Nikolaos and Freddy,
Thanks for the insights, I really appreciate you guys (and everyone else
participating in this thread) taking the time to talk about Stripes (and
even competing frameworks) strengths and weaknesses, even if they are only
perceived. I have yet to do all that much in Spring MVC. I'm planning on
building the whole JPA domain model and services first. If, in my
implementation, I find that I'm fighting Spring MVC more than I would like,
then Stripes would likely be the next framework I would look at. Like I
said, I have one other friend working on the development with me, so I'll
need to keep up to date on what is going on in the stripes community. I
don't plan on leaving this list any time soon. I would like to see how this
newly renewed excitement pans out for Stripes.
Thanks again,
Joel
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Nikolaos Giannopoulos <
nikol...@brightminds.org> wrote:
> Joel,
>
> Just thought it would be interesting to echo Freddy's points from a
> different perspective.
>
> We are currently developing a social networking site that will span 8
> countries and 2 languages and are inviting 500K users for starters. We are
> leveraging Stripes, Stripersist, JPA 2.0, Hibernate, Lucene, Spring,
> Memcached,... within a 3/4 tier architecture - RP (web servers), UI / WS
> (app servers), DB and are even incorporating custom DB Sharding.
>
> When we did our analysis to try to find the right UI framework I was
> initially drawn away from JSF OR Struts because I had used both in the past
> (and though Struts 2 appears a whole lot better and JSF 2 is a whole lot
> better it just wasn't very appealing) and was drawn towards Spring MVC
> because of yes *perception*... it is part of an established and extremely
> well respected and well known framework - *Spring*. I then started looking
> at presentations that compared frameworks and was more convinced than ever
> that Spring MVC was the way to go and all was well... . I had a lot of
> experience developing with Spring and Hibernate in the past and already had
> the tomb sized Pro book on Spring and others on Hibernate. I also have a
> subscription to Safari Online and pretty much found all the resources that I
> thought I needed.
>
> Then I walked into a book store and saw *by accident* this rather slim book
> - yes 1-inch thick is *really* slim - on a framework I had never heard about
> and started reading it and found it to be quite interesting. In developing
> with Java since the early 1.1.8 days and JBuilder Enterprisse 2 (which
> allowed one to build an actual Enterprise / usable Java app) and having been
> a Java Applications Architect (as well as many other things for well over a
> decade working with companies public and private including Fortune 100/500)
> I started to really appreciate and salivate at the thought that I could
> actually build a Java app that didn't get in my way, that didn't force so
> much boiler plate down my throat that I would spend more time refactoring
> and keeping things aligned than I would on actual features.
>
> Then I had a *perception* let down. I was amazed to hear that Stripes
> development team didn't really care to see the latest and greatest 1.5.3 in
> Maven Central Repo (there are JIRA tickets still open on this) and then the
> *reality* that the community is much smaller and less active and yes that
> may be a testament to Stripes being solid but it is a *risk* when an
> architect has the opportunity to pick any UI framework they want.
>
> After lot's of thought, some indecision, and having bought Freddy's book
> regardless, I started asking questions on this list and I have to admit I
> don't *technically* regret that decision. At times I feel like I might but
> that is due to the *perception* factor that even now affects me when I am
> happily using Stripes and a convert and was the match that started this
> fiery thread. I too didn't know that "Tim" had departed.
>
> So what does Stripes offer - well I have to say Freddy's book is worth
> every dime especially for the 1 DAO BaseModel superclass leveraging
> Stripersist and JPA 2.0 and that's it... Hibernate is transparently under
> the covers... on top of action beans, localization and all sorts of other
> great stuff allowed me to spend literally *MOST* of my time developing a
> sharding layer, constructing POJO model, building web services and
> constructing the UI layout, forms, etc... Yes, all the things a developer
> should only need concern themselves with and the things that draw appeal
> towards other frameworks are actually right here and inherent in Stripes.
>
> <aside>
>
> In fact just a month *BEFORE* discovering Stripes I had actually bought a
> subscription to MyEclipseIDE which includes all manner of scaffolding and
> tools for Spring and Hibernate and do you know what I use from MyEclipseIDE
> today... the JSP editor (which isn't that great), subeclipse, testng, maven
> and some other Eclipse plugin-ins. That is it!!!! All the wonderful
> scaffolding and tools are not necessary when using Stripes. I pretty much
> could have gone with downloading vanilla Eclipse and installing a handful of
> plug-ins... . A true testament to the product i.e. a few years ago RAD
> tools were all the craze - synchronize your POJO's to Hibernate and back -
> guess what that takes a lot of time when developing and I simply don't care
> - I simply re-run my app and my database is reconstructed based on my model
> POJO's... . Sure once the product releases you need to deal with Schema
> files and update them / migrate data but that is going to happen
> regardless... .
>
> ... the point is tools only need to be great and books need to be tomb like
> when something is overly complex and over engineered... .
>
> </aside>
>
> Someone on the main thread said Stripes is *dying*... I disagree... what
> Stripes is hurting from is *perception*.
>
> Lastly, I was literally 99% convinced I was going with Spring MVC and am
> glad I didn't because I know I would still be in the early stages of
> development. Fighting with Tools or struggling with the Framework.
>
> Of course - YMMV and I hope your decision will be the best for you whatever
> you decide ;-)
>
> HTH,
>
> --Nikolaos
>
>
>
>
> Freddy Daoud wrote:
>
> Hi Joel,
>
>
>
> We are 99% sure we are going to go with Spring MVC. We are still
> implementing
>
>
> the JPA/Spring based back end, so right now the UI is simply hello world,
> but it
> was pretty simple to get at least something put together.
>
>
>
> The other consideration was JSF 2. I've been using JSF at my full time job
>
>
> for about 3 years now and seen some successes and some difficulties with it.
> While JSF 2 is much, much better than JSF 1.x, for this project the whole
> component model felt way too heavy, which is why Stripes was such a draw.
>
>
>
> I'm anxiously looking forward to your thoughts on the subject, Freddy.
>
>
> Well, if I was not allowed to use Stripes for whatever reason, I would
> definitely prefer Spring MVC over JSF 2. JSF 1.x is awful, and JSF 2,
> although not as bad, is still unnecessarily complicated.
>
> I looked at Spring 3 briefly and liked what I saw. I didn't dig deep, so
> I can't form a real opinion (there is more to a real web app than a
> hello world form), but at least the "Spring requires too much configuration"
> argument is no longer valid. Spring 3 does its part in using convention
> over configuration, and using annotations instead of XML.
>
> Cheers,
> Freddy
>
>
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