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20080205 Tuesday February 05, 2008

Groovy, Rails needs Components, RIA Frameworks compared and faster WebTests Here's some interesting snippets I found while reading blogs today:

  • Stop writing plain old Java code. Groovy obsoletes plain old Java. We ought to just say "Java 7 = Groovy" and move on. -- Stuart Halloway
  • So far my experience is that I love the Ruby language and don't want to go back to doing Java except when/if I need to to pay the bills. But Rails I'm not as sold on. Mind you I'm not here to bash on Rails, there are some great things there and other people have done a fine job of praising them. But there are some things I definitely miss from Tapestry, and the most significant one is components. -- MysteryCoder
  • If you're looking for maximum control over presentation and the best possible appearance for the finished product, I would say Flex is probably the way to go. If you're a Java developer using Java on the server side, or you just can't stand the thought of having your app run in the Flash player and would prefer JavaScript, GWT is probably going to work out very well for you. Open Laszlo is going to offer a great deal of platform versatility, but at the expense of some polish and features available in the other two frameworks. - Kevin Whinnery in Three RIA Platforms Compared: Adobe Flex, Google Web Toolkit, and OpenLaszlo
  • A new experimental feature of WebTest allows to specify the number of threads that should be used for the tests what can bring enormous speed improvements without modification of the tests. -- Marc Guillemot

To summarize: use Groovy over Java, Rails needs components, Flex is the best RIA framework and WebTest keeps getting better. These aren't my words, but I don't see much fault in them either. Posted in Java at Feb 05 2008, 12:30:34 AM MST 6 Comments

Comments:

Until Groovy stops being a random grab-bag of semi-coherent features and develops into a well-defined language with a spec, it's not going to challenge Java in any domain other than small-time web hackery. (Which is not to say it won't get there. It's improving a lot. But it has a long way to go.)

Posted by Al Lang on February 05, 2008 at 12:59 AM MST #

And of course you have examples for "semi-coherent features"? Spec is in the works: http://groovy.codehaus.org/jsr/spec ;)

Posted by Sakuraba on February 05, 2008 at 05:07 AM MST #

I'd say Scala is the new Java. Scala == Java 7.

Posted by Mats Henricson on February 05, 2008 at 08:55 AM MST #

Al, is curious you mention "a well-defined language with a spec" for Groovy, because it is the second language in the JVM that has a JSR, so please get your facts straight.

Posted by Andres Almiray on February 05, 2008 at 11:19 AM MST #

For a narrow definition of RIA.

Posted by James on February 08, 2008 at 12:08 AM MST #

I recall you complaining (justifiably) about the lack of IDE support for OpenLaszlo. I recently discovered an excellent Eclipse plugin for writing Laszlo apps. http://www.spket.com/laszlo.html It's free for non-commerecial use, and speeds up Laszlo development by an order of magnitude.

Posted by Donal on February 09, 2008 at 10:41 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is a UI Architect specializing in open source web frameworks. Contact me for rates.
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