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20051102 Wednesday November 02, 2005

Simon begins "The Journey" It's pretty cool to see that Simon is going to begin a quest to find the best web framework to fit his needs.

Struts, WebWork, Stripes, Spring MVC, Wicket, Tapestry, JSF, etc, or even rolling your own. With so many J2EE web application frameworks to choose from, how do you decide which one to use? Several articles (e.g. JavaServer Faces vs Tapestry) and presentations (e.g. Comparing Web Frameworks) already exist, but they generally concentrate on a small subset of the available frameworks.

This can be a daunting task, but it sounds like he's got a good plan:

Clearly this is a massive task so, to reduce the scope, I'm going to focus on what it takes to build a read only web application. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 80-20 rule applies. 80% of a web application is read only and 20% is interactive (e.g. HTML forms, AJAX, etc). Of course, this is changing with technologies like AJAX, but we're still on the upward curve. Traditionally, that 20% is the most complex and is an area where many web application frameworks claim their unique selling points. For this reason, I may iterate over the evaluation process to take into account how the frameworks help web developers build interactive webapps. For now, I'm going to look at whether the frameworks make doing the 80% easy.

Notice that Simon has added a couple frameworks that I haven't worked with: Stripes and Wicket. It should be interesting to see his findings. Not every framework is designed to do the same thing, so it'll be cool to find out which one Simon thinks is the best for read-only applications. Posted in Java at Nov 02 2005, 03:18:32 PM MST 3 Comments

Comments:

Great, now look at what you have done. You have made all these good, decent, wholesome, and productive programmers go on some sort of spiritual journey to find framework peace.

Posted by Dan Hinojosa on November 03, 2005 at 04:15 PM MST #

Three of my favourite criteria are: * How easy it would be to ditch the framework if it turned out to be a mistake. * How much non-generic stuff it makes you learn. * How easy it is to do something outside of what the framework provides. I always hated Struts on the grounds that it was pretty poor for all of these. Cheers Sam

Posted by Sam Hough on November 04, 2005 at 03:22 AM MST #

I wouldn't bother spending any time comparing framework support of read-only portions of a web app because there's nothing to compare.

Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on November 04, 2005 at 10:03 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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