This is an excellent question, Ted, thanks for bringing it up. At Atlassian, we've been rolling out a few new internal applications built on Grails and have been amazed how easy it can be. They take production-ready libraries like Hibernate and Spring, then tie everything together in a seamless way through the Grails layer and a set of conventions. In particular, their tags are well-done, which is a big productivity boon.
One of my main problems with Java development is the fact there are just so many layers. To write a simple feature, you have to mess with all sorts of languages, formats, conventions, and libraries. I'm amused at this current "polygot programming" movement, as the Java community has been writing apps in multiple languages from the beginning. Just look at the number of languages and formats a developer should know to write a Struts app: * Java * JSP * JSTL * XML (and its many schemas) * HTML * Javascript * OGNL * FreeMarker (to customize tags) * Velocity (optional) * and then all the libraries and their own little expression languages and API's Grails does a good job tying it together and dusting a nice layer of Groovy on top of it all so yes, you can dig into those layers if you want, but you don't have to. I'm not sure how exactly we'd bring that to Struts, but I certainly see the need for better improving the developer experience, because after all, that was the original purpose of the Struts 2 project. Don On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 9:43 PM, Ted Husted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Since it's friday, let me pose a question to the group ... > > Even with rock-solid frameworks like Apache Struts, it still seems > like web application development takes longer than it should. Some > frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, speak directly to "time to market" > concerns and have been gathering many followers. > > But why does web application still seem so difficult or so > time-consuming? Are there time bandits that still suck days or weeks > out of your development schedule? Are there time gremlins that > "nickel-and-dime" you every hour of every day? Is there anything more > that frameworks like Apache Struts can do to help? Or are just there > intractable problems with web development itself? > > Thoughts? :) > > -Ted. > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
