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20080723 Wednesday July 23, 2008

[OSCON 2008] Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grails and Rails Below is the presentation I'm delivering at OSCON today. Unfortunately, I had to remove slides on GWT and Flex to fit w/in the 45 minute time limit. I hope to expand this presentation in the future, as well as continue to develop the side project I'm working on using these technologies.

Posted in Open Source at Jul 23 2008, 04:25:23 PM MDT 18 Comments

Comments:

Any idea if video footage of this presentation is (or ever will be) available online?

Posted by Donal on July 23, 2008 at 05:43 PM MDT #

Hey Matt, great presentation as usual ;). I just wanted to let you know that I embedded your presentation on slideshare at the Chilean's JUG site (www.jug.cl). Best Regards, José M. Selman

Posted by Jose Selman on July 23, 2008 at 07:51 PM MDT #

Hi Matt, I spoke with you after the presentation comparing the strengths and weaknesses of GWT and Wicket. Excellent presentation. I really enjoyed your humor and down to earth manner.

Posted by Timothy Christensen on July 23, 2008 at 10:02 PM MDT #

@Donal - I didn't see any video cameras in the room, so I don't think there's any video footage. If you're in Denver, I'm doing this same presentation at DeRailed next Thursday.

Posted by Matt Raible on July 23, 2008 at 10:41 PM MDT #

Hey Matt, someone from our JUG mentioned that he missed ZK in this presentation. Can I ask what do you think about it? I know that with the web framework's plethora it's hard to cover all of them but it seems that ZK in particular has gained a lot of momentum.

Posted by Jose Selman on July 24, 2008 at 06:05 PM MDT #

@Jose - I have no opinion on ZK as I've never used it. I currently have no plans to use it in the future. I am interested in learning more about Appcelerator.

Posted by Matt Raible on July 24, 2008 at 07:05 PM MDT #

Thanks for the mention on SOUI and Appcelerator. Let me know if you never need any help or motivation to get started with appcelerator. :)

Posted by jeff haynie on July 25, 2008 at 11:08 AM MDT #

Thanks for a very informative presentation. I would argue that your slides on Grails vs Rails might be a little misleading. Since Grails and Groovy seem to be natural extensions of Java, it wouldn't be very hard for someone with Java / Spring expertise to ramp up quickly in Grails. While Grails and Groovy are 'newer' projects, the guts ( Hibernate, Spring, all the plugins like Lucene ) have been around for probably longer than Rails, and nothing beats server side java when it comes to stability and performance. I would also recommend the book The Definitive Guide to Grails by Graeme Rocher, the project leader of the Grails project. This book is the bible of Grails development after the Grails user manual...

Posted by Tomas Lin on July 26, 2008 at 12:47 AM MDT #

There is a major misspelling on the first slide.

Posted by Akuskus on July 28, 2008 at 01:59 PM MDT #

@Akuskus - thanks for letting me know. I've correct it so it reads "Grails" rather than "Grail". (blush)

Posted by Matt Raible on July 28, 2008 at 09:30 PM MDT #

Awesome slides.

I am currently building a Grails-App with GWT matching the exact architecture that SOFEA describes. I didnt know how close to current trends we were with building it this way. ;)

Posted by Daniel on July 29, 2008 at 01:11 AM MDT #

[Trackback] Ausformulierte Linksammlungen werden ab jetzt unter diesem Titel firmieren. Bei dem Wetter wird es sich dabei aber wohl um seltene Ereignisse handeln.Wieder gab es natürlich viel erwähnenswertes in den letzten zwei Wochen, dennoch werde ich mich heut...

Posted by emplify on August 03, 2008 at 03:04 PM MDT #

Pitty there's no audio or video - would be great for those of us that can't go to these things (i.e. most of the rest of the world).

Posted by Antony Stubbs on August 07, 2008 at 12:53 AM MDT #

Matt,

I'm amazed by your ignorance and prejudice on certain framework technologies. Most of the frameworks you suggest or rather "provide competitive overview" are rather stale by now and are as empty as a nut shell. Consider JBoss Seam 2.x, (and the upcoming 2.1), or the new EJB 3.1 spec which is the "lightest" spec ever to come out of Sun. They have a significant feature set compared to *any other* java web framework out there.

Personally I would vote for Seam+GWT stack OR Rails stack. There is simply no other framework (including Grails which is just vanilla and beans) that has so many features in-built as first class citizens in the framework.

Rather than educate your readers and provide in depth analysis, I'm time and again surprised by your minimalistic methods of comparing web frameworks, including the count of job listings on Monster or Dice (which is insane and doesn't really augment or support good technologies). It's like saying Linux has 3% market share and Windows has 88%, so windows is good. I'd rather not hear such reviews coming from an open source enthusiast like you.

Posted by Revert To Console on August 12, 2008 at 11:35 AM MDT #

> Matt, I'm amazed by your ignorance and prejudice on certain framework technologies.

I agree that the presentation offers little information. However, I think it's important to know that the presentation itself is only a small part of my talk and I often refute what's said on some slides. For example, I always say the stats are just "pretty graphs" and they can be interpreted either way. The reason I put them in there is they make a presentation look good and tend to get some laughs (and interest) from the audience.

Also, just because a web framework includes the kitchen sink of features doesn't necessarily make it the best framework out there. I think different applications have different needs and you should choose your framework based on what the application needs, not based on your favorite framework.

Posted by Matt Raible on August 12, 2008 at 12:39 PM MDT #

Also, just because a web framework includes the kitchen sink of features doesn't necessarily make it the best framework out there.

True, but my point was -- why is the comparison not exclusive?

think different applications have different needs and you should choose your framework based on what the application needs, not based on your favorite framework.

Seam or GWT are not my favorite frameworks, they just happened to be the most productive and feature-rich frameworks that I'm working these days and my experience has been very good so far compared to Spring, Hibernate or even Grails.(for over 3,4 years). I still don't see your expert advice/analysis on EJB 3.x or JBoss Seam, not even a maven archetype for Seam in Appfuse -- any particular (personal) reason?

Posted by Revert To Console on August 12, 2008 at 12:49 PM MDT #

Seam or GWT are not my favorite frameworks, they just happened to be the most productive and feature-rich frameworks that I'm working these days and my experience has been very good so far compared to Spring, Hibernate or even Grails.(for over 3,4 years).

I know folks have written about it before, but it'd be great to hear from someone "in the trenches" about why you prefer the Seam + GWT combination. Let me know if you ever write a blog post on this.

I still don't see your expert advice/analysis on EJB 3.x or JBoss Seam, not even a maven archetype for Seam in Appfuse -- any particular (personal) reason?

I'm more of a front-end guy, but my opinion on EJB 3 is you can get the same functionality from Hibernate + Spring without requiring a full-blown application server. As far as a Maven Archetype for Seam, I don't know that it would make much sense since Seam has most (if not all) the same features as AppFuse. I could see how it might be interesting to use Seam to create a feature-set like AppFuse has, but that's about it. Why haven't I done that? I haven't had the time nor interest.

I think if JSF ever becomes more RESTful (which it might), I may be more interested. As far as using Wicket or GWT with Seam, that appeals to me more. However, there's only so many hours in a day and I don't get paid to evaluate web frameworks. It's just a hobby of mine these days.

Posted by Matt Raible on August 12, 2008 at 01:21 PM MDT #

I've used Seam for 6 months now and we have an app in production in a top financial firm with all you can-think-features. It took one developer. Same stuff in Spring or Hibernate or Grails with the kind of ajax UI, would have taken 2 times more time with atleast 2 developers. I myself would want to write a blog post on my learnings on Seam one day, but I can tell you -- it deserves more credit and pep-talk than most other "empty" frameworks out there. As for RESTful, watch out for Seam 2.1 in a few months, it has out-of-the-box support for RESTful webapp based on JSR

As for "full blown app servers" -- that's the myth that most people have. Seam can run on Tomcat. Period. Even otherwise, I really don't understand why people are so afraid of running on a "full blown" app server like JBoss, it really doesn't hurt. In fact a lot of things are much more simpler, like transactions or JPA APi, without a single line of xml. The definition of "light weight" vs "full blown" is really debatable, considering what Spring has made itself of, in the last couple of years.

PS: I don't get paid to blog or market for Seam either, just my genuine interest to share a technology which I've really enjoyed working in the recent past.

Posted by Revert To Console on August 12, 2008 at 01:33 PM MDT #

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