Raible Designs

Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on November 14, 2007 at 04:34 PM MST #

Now, on to the meat of the presentation...
My brief experience with GWT was in trying to attach a web front end on top of an existing set of services and domain objects, which had been written in java 5. I'd have to say that it didn't turn out too well.

Conclusions I reached:

• Lack of Java5 support is really painful.
• It's hard to attach GWT on top of an existing code base.
• GWT seems to invade your code base fairly thoroughly - you're end up writing GWT apps, not java apps with a GWT UI.
• Adding ClickListeners, etc, reminds me of the bad old days. It's not awful, but it didn't feel comfortable
• The UI is "nice" but it's not pretty unless you add in some decent stylesheets. And given how much of the HTML is generated by Javascript, that's harder than I wanted it to be.
• The provided documentation ain't so nice, but there are books available (which I haven't read yet)

Posted by Tim Vernum on November 14, 2007 at 05:58 PM MST #

Posted by 67.190.209.2 on November 14, 2007 at 06:51 PM MST #

Posted by Thomas Risberg on November 14, 2007 at 07:03 PM MST #

>> I think the Flex perceived popularity might be a function of it's difficulty.

I was on a Java team with no Flex experience and we grew weary of fighting x-browser issues building complex GUIs. We took on Flex and were productive with it in a very short time. In a matter of a few weeks we had some pretty pimped out GUIs going. It's really not that difficult. Matt, I'll be curious to see what your opinion is after you've gotten a chance to dive in with it.

Posted by ebc on November 14, 2007 at 11:32 PM MST #

Posted by Kalle Korhonen on November 15, 2007 at 02:29 AM MST #

There are indeed a lot of "flex time" jobs, hence your data (and conclusion) is incorrect.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java+spring+MVC%2C+java+flex%2C+java+GWT&l=

I've added "Java" as a keyword, as anyway you want your developers to be Java-savvy, no matter what the framework is.

I must say that those trends make a lot more sense to me. For example, Flex has been Open-Sourced in June 2006, and you can see the Flex trend going up quicker after that.

Posted by Julien Dubois on November 15, 2007 at 05:03 AM MST #

Posted by Didier Girard on November 15, 2007 at 06:57 AM MST #

Posted by Jason Graff on November 15, 2007 at 07:10 AM MST #

I second the other concerns. With dice you can directly go to searches beyond 500 by manipulating the URL. Very funny are the job offerings for Microsoft for Flex :-) They are flex-time, flex-budget etc. but it's funny when you consider that you have counted dozens of Microsoft offerings in your 969 Flex chart.

Searching for "Microsoft Flex" results in 150 hits.

Peace
-stephan

--
Stephan Schmidt :: [email protected]
Reposita Open Source - Monitor your software development
http://www.reposita.org
Blog at http://stephan.reposita.org - No signal. No noise.

Posted by Stephan Schmidt on November 15, 2007 at 08:46 AM MST #

Hi Matt,

I have read your presentation and I would like to add the advantages and disadvantages each framework has related to security. In my opinion it is very important for any company to develop secure web applications. That´s why choosing a framework that can avoid typical security vulnerabilities (integrity, data tampering...) is essencial.

From all the frameworks that are mentioned, only Wicket ensures data integrity! JSF ensures integrity of most data, but doesn´t protect against data tampering in a 100%. So, I think this is a con for Struts 2, Spring MVC, JSF, Stripes and Tapestry framework, because none of them protects us against data tampering.

I think it would be worthy to mention that new security frameworks have been developed to fill this gap. For example, HDIV supports Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Spring MVC and JSTL and ensures data integrity in a 100%. Besides, it offers data confidentiality to avoid users visualize sensitive data. As far as I have tested it, it is capable of defining XML rules to avoid cross-site scripting attacks.

So, in my opinion security is necessary in any business environment and, from my own experience, I can assure you that it is very helpful to use a framework which offers a minimun security level. Otherwise, it is a pain (and very risky) to apply it manually in the source code of the application.

thank you!

Posted by Alexander Rusmanov on November 15, 2007 at 10:42 AM MST #

How does FlexUnit, that works like JUnit, measure up as far as testing flex applications?

http://code.google.com/p/as3flexunitlib/

Posted by Sib on November 15, 2007 at 11:28 AM MST #

Hi Matt,

I've written a feedback for your presentation on my blog since I need some formatting for the post.

Posted by Joshua on November 15, 2007 at 08:44 PM MST #

Posted by Matt Raible on November 16, 2007 at 10:48 AM MST #

Posted by Antony Stubbs on November 19, 2007 at 06:05 PM MST #

Hi Matt,

Well great presentations!,

In the internationalization section, you said that JSF need a declaration for the message bundle in every page but there is a way to declare it just once in the faces-config.xml,

<application>
   <resource-bundle>
       <base-name>org.aldo.messages</base-name>
       <var>msg</var>
    </resource-bundle>
</application>

Regards,

Posted by Aldo Solis on November 20, 2007 at 07:16 PM MST #

Posted by Gadi on November 21, 2007 at 04:43 AM MST #

Hi

Regarding Wicket, it seems to me that the html templates can be put somewhere else than next to the Java classes. It's just not the default behavior.

For the tight binding between pages and views, I don't really understand the point.

The view is, I guess, the html template where wicket only search for wicket id and otherwise one can put whatever he wants into it. Personally, the fact that the html is "just" straight html is really, I find, an advantage : your web designers can easily work with them !

And if one desires just a wicket id and nothing else, let's use a panel which encapsulates all the components and you're done.

Could you provide more explanations ?

Regarding Flex, I've the understanding it's not an open source framework, whereas all the others are. Am I correct ?

Thanks in advance

Cheers
ZedroS

Posted by ZedroS on November 26, 2007 at 09:57 AM MST #

Matt,

Great presentations on a very useful topic! You were asking for feedback in case you do something like this at JavaOne. One thing that I would like is a matrix comparing the selection criteria for each framework. You list out a lot of criteria, and then have room for only one slide of highlights for each framework. The highlights are great discussion points but they still leave lots of room for 'religious' arguments.

By doing them up in a spreadsheet matrix, it would force a more objective side-by-side comparison of each criteria. If the spreadsheet were distributed, perhaps we could all enter our own weighting factor for each criteria as suggested toward the end of your presentation. The winner would come out based on what is important for our site.

Posted by Bob O'Malley on December 11, 2007 at 08:07 PM MST #

Posted by Matt Raible on August 05, 2010 at 02:04 PM MDT #