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20080317 Monday March 17, 2008

Proposal accepted for OSCON 2008 OSCON 2008 From an e-mail I received earlier this afternoon:

We are pleased to accept the following proposal for OSCON 2008.

* Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grails and Rails

It has been scheduled for 16:30 on 23 Jul 2008.

My Abstract:

What if the choices in web framework was reduced to 4? If RIA are the way of the future, it's possible that these 4 frameworks are the best choices for this development paradigm. This session will explore these frameworks, as well as entertain many other's opinions on the future of web development.

RESTful backends are easy to create with both Rails and Grails. Ajax frontends are simple to create and maintain with GWT. Flex gives you flash and a pretty UI. If you're an HTML developer, Rails allows you to quickly develop MVC applications. If you're a Java Developer, GWT + Grails might be a match made in heaven. This session is designed to help you learn more about each framework and decide which combination is best for your project.

I'm really looking forward to learning about GWT and Flex in the coming months. If you have any experience (or opinions) about the abstract above, I'd love to hear it. The louder the better.

For those who haven't been, OSCON is one of those truly special conferences. Possible reasons:

I'm going for all 4 reasons and even made a reservation to stay at The Kennedy School. Should be a fun show. Posted in Open Source at Mar 17 2008, 07:21:10 PM MDT 8 Comments

Comments:

Congratulations!

Minor comment: it would have been nice to have a link to OSCON in the post to further encourage someone like me to learn more about it.

Posted by Stevi Deter on March 17, 2008 at 08:28 PM MDT #

I'm incredibly impressed with the speed of Flex 3. It used to be slower than regular HTML. Now, with the new caching framework, it's a lot faster. Given that it's gorgeous looking to, that almost makes it an allout winner. The one big problem that prevents me from using Flex is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Same for GWT (and extjs for that matter). If you read up on it, you will find all sorts of half brained workarounds to the problem that Google bots simply cannot properly parse sites with java arrays full of URLs or Flash byte code. The only tool that I've found so far that allows me to have my cake and eat it is YUI because it always allows you a choice of coding the full javascript way or use HTML/DIV. Of course, YUI is just a toolbox and not a full fledged framework. You could argue that Google is being lazy here, since they're not keeping up with technological developments and basically can't even get the contents for their own GWT framework "botted". I'm not going to give a "but" here, they are being lazy. And it's hurting us all.

Posted by Marc on March 18, 2008 at 03:51 AM MDT #

I guess I will start the: "What about......." series of responses.

What about Seam?

Posted by Daniel Hinojosa on March 18, 2008 at 08:05 AM MDT #

@Stevi - good point. I've added a link and logo.

@Daniel - it's easier to exclude than include. I've never been impressed with JSF and if I'm just using the backend of Seam, I'd rather use Spring + Hibernate or JPA. That's just personal preference though - I'm sure others feel different. To each their own.

Posted by Matt Raible on March 18, 2008 at 09:57 AM MDT #

I am using Grails with GWT and I think it is the most productive stack to produce web 2.0 ajax apps on the JVM.

Posted by Sakuraba on March 18, 2008 at 12:26 PM MDT #

Matt:

I didn't realize it but the REST principle forces just the content return, service kick-off, etc. It isolates the task from the flash. Damn, that was a good statement. I'll repeat it. REST isolates the task from the flash.

I really wasn't trying to be a smartass with that but, the widget state development on the page should be saved for GWT, AJAX, Flex, etc. You should be able to get a page in some form that includes data, turn all the knobs, push all the switches, see all the movies, etc., (maybe AJAX could post a dialog "are you finished playing?") and when you are done press the submit button saving your changes.

We say that HTML is stateless. Yes, HTML content is stateless and client applications should be. pssst ... can we all say "URL minus parameters". I think we may be nearing a plateau in web development.

Tell Don to publish his talk in some manner for those that couldn't attend.

Posted by David Whitehurst on March 27, 2008 at 10:36 AM MDT #

But but but Wicket!

Posted by Michael Laccetti on April 03, 2008 at 12:36 PM MDT #

at the mean time, I am looking at what skill set I/my team has. We are all java skilled so we do perfer GWT and it is our preferred framework. Though, that's not the only reason. But say in 2-3 years time, when the frameworks get more advanced, we will need to consider which of the frameworks do proof their concept fully and how widely they are being used.

Posted by Lochin on May 07, 2008 at 10:49 PM MDT #

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