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Thoughts On the State of Web Development
rmoskal recommends his blog post up at Most Media on finding the right level of abstraction, Grails, and SOFEA. "[Three years ago] I was very excited about Apache Wicket as the way to develop line of business applications with a domain model, CRUD [create-read-update-delete] screens for maintaining the model, and in the most interesting cases, doing something else useful besides. I still like Wicket. It has, as its website says, a small conceptual surface area.' It reminds me of Python in that 'You try something it usually just works.' In many respects, though, Wicket seems to be at the wrong level of abstraction for the for the sorts of line-of-business applications described above. If your team is spending any time at all writing code to produce listing, filtering, and sorting behavior, not to mention creating CRUD screens and the back-end logic for these operations, they are probably working at the wrong level of abstraction. ... Recently I did a small project using Grails and was quite pleased. Grails uses groovy, a dynamic language compatible with Java, and is based on the proven technologies that I know and love well: Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Maven, etc. ... I get all the power of the Java ecosystem without the fustiness and lack of expressivity of the core language (no more getters and setters, ever!)."
Using Java for web development is like using a wrecking ball to hammer in a nail. Use something that fits the job better, like Zend Framework, Django or Ruby on Rails. In web development, time to market is everything. Build your application and hopefully you get a large user base. Then when performance is an issue, you should already be working on a rewrite that can incorporate something like Java on the backend.
As I've said before on slashdot, the open-source movement should look at creating a new GUI browser that does desktop-like and CRUD GUI's well. Forcing the e-brochure-like HTML-based browsers to act like desktop/CRUD GUI's is like trying to roll Pluto up Mt. Everest: people have kept trying to pull it off with AJAX and whatnot for more than a decade, but it's still kludgy, bloated, buggy, security-challenged, and version-sensitive.
It's time to throw in the towel and start a new tool and markup language.
Table-ized A.I.