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Ask Slashdot: Tips For Designing a Modern Web Application?
New submitter sdoca writes "I am a Java developer and for the past number of years I have mainly been working on server side code. I have an idea for a webpage/application that I would like to develop. For the general public, it will be a site where they can view upcoming events, filter them by type, date etc. and view details of events they're interested in. There will also be an admin section to the app where organizations who want to post their events can log in and set them up. In the long term, writing a view-only version as an Apple and/or Android app is on the radar, but I want to focus on the generic web app for now. I'm not sure what languages/frameworks to look at using for the webpage portion of my project. Many (many!) years ago, I wrote some applets. After that I did some work in WebObjects and after that I tinkered with Wicket. I have no experience with PHP and would like to stay in my Java comfort zone as much as possible, but want to use the right tool. I'm concerned about browser compatibility issues. Chrome didn't exist when I last did web page development. I'm looking for good resources (books, internet) that will guide me through the potential issues and your recommendations for a web development framework."
If you're familiar with Java but not web development, it sounds like Grails might be a good place to start.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
It's been a long time since I've used the Google Widget Toolkit, but it was an interesting shim between Java and WebApps. Would someone with more recent experience than mine please chime in and say whether it would be useful to the original poster?
its the worst thing you could ever attempt to learn
I just started playing around with the Play framework (Java/Scala) I'm loving it, and I'm coming from *gasp WebObjects, and .Net. I can't speak too much about its features but it's really simple to get up and running connected to a database and serving content, as well as creating REST api. Deployment is a single command.
This is what I'm using for a tutorial: https://github.com/jamesward/play2torial/blob/master/JAVA.md
Forget PHP. The language has seen very little progress lately. But even that wouldn't matter, as PHP is slow and horrible. Very inconsistent as well, as the it's little more than glue between some libraries.
Just use a CMS and call it good. I remember the days before very customizable templating where you hand-roled all that web site crap yourself. There are plenty of CMSs out there (TomatoCMS, Wordpress, Joomla, LightCMS, ezPublish, etc) that will do exactly what you want in about 20 minutes of your time. There's also lots of customizing and add-on's you can get for the more popular CMS's that I mentioned, too. And to keep to your Java roots, you can do all the client side stuff you want in JQuery or equivalent.
That's my $0.02.
I have two suggestions that are close to staying with Java:
(1) Check out Spring (http://www.springsource.org/); Spring has a bunch of goodies that make developing web apps easier, and the guys from spring (Adrian Colyer, Richard MacDougall) are thinking really hard about scalable web services. This is a foundation that will let you write in Java but still be prepared for the future.
(2) Even better, don't go with Java, but leverage some of what you learned and pick up Scala. See http://www.scala-lang.org/, or pick up Martin Odersky's book. Think of Scala as what Java would be if someone who appreciated terse, expressive syntax and great convention redesigned Java. Odersky wrote a reference JVM implementation while at Sun, and Scala compiles into Java bytecode and can directly use Scala libraries. (My first Scala project, for example, I used unboundid's LDAP libs directly in my Scala code.) Odersky along with some other luminaries (Viktor Klang, Paul Phillips, etc) have formed Typesafe, and are producing Scala the language + Akka (an actor framework) + Play (a web framework). Outside of play, many people are huge fans of Lift, and it does have some magic that no other framework has.
Remember how you said "modern" web application? Well, Scala supports functional programming, and you can fix functional and imperative code in the same application, which means you can support massively scalable sites by writing clean, idempotent code where needed.
If all this sounds bad, then I'd recommend Django+Python, as it is, imo, the best way for a relative web novice to produce decent code, and the amount you can do with a few hours reading docs and then digging in is shocking.
You're talking about desktop GUI development - the submitter is asking about Java for web development. That's quite different. How many GUI apps do you use regularly that are written in Python, Ruby, or even Tcl/Tk?
PHP is garbage. Bad design all over the place. And I'm talking both about the language as well as the standard mess it calls a "library". It is the new BASIC.. stay away it'll damage your brain. For details see:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
There are better alternatives if you want to go the dynamic route: Ruby on Rails and I hear Python / Django is great too.
There's nothing wrong with Java as long as you know how to use it. But its always good to learn a new language. ASP.Net is also nice if you don't want to go dynamic.
The hardest part about moving away from Java is losing all the cool static analysis tools that are incorporated in Eclipse as well as tools such as FindBugs. But our experience with RoR (in spite of it missing some needed feature many Java frameworks have).
In summary: learn anything but PHP.. it truly is garbage that must die.
To be honest you're gong to have to know some HTML/CSS at some point. It's considered impolite these days to insist (or expect) that the client side understands Java.
In other words, assume that Java ISN'T supported on the clientside.
Frameworks are good only if all of the following are true:
1)You want to do exactly what the framework was set up to do. (in other words, everything about your app is cookie cutter)
2)You aren't a very good programmer
3)You already know the framework
4)You don't want to do something wild and crazy, like write an sql query (the framework way tends to use 3 objects which define interfaces and require you to jump through hoops, all so it will automatically grab the data and unbox it for you in the format it assumes you want it in, rather than the format you actually want it in).
5)You absolutely don't want to use any advanced database functionality whatsoever, since most frameworks these days assume that they can create and alter tables at will.
If those first two things aren't true, you're going to spend an order of magnitude more time working around the framework's limitations than you will save by using it. If 2 and 3 aren't true, you'll spend more time learning how to use the framework than you'd save by using it.
Frameworks are good for getting low to moderately skilled developers to pump out cookie cutter type apps quickly (so long as those apps don't need to worry about little things like scale and performance). They're absolutely horrible if you want to do anything novel, you need performance, or you actually know sql and just want to write a simple god damn query.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
What do you mean you cannot build a 'modern' webapp using Java? It's done all the time. If memory serves, Gmail is in Java. I also disagree with PHP being the obvious choice. It's a lot like JavaScript: it's everywhere, so people use it. It doesn't change the fact that it's a piece of rubbish. Ruby and Python are much better suited towards modern web development. PHP is glorified template system that is extremely inconsistent and overall ass backwards. The whole notion of mapping a URI to a file is so 1990's.
For reference, I come from a LAMP + CodeIgniter background. I've done some Java stuff for university and at IBM, but nothing on the web side.
If you're coming from a Java background, I'd suggest a Python + Django (heavier framework) / Flask (lighter framework), or Ruby on Rails on top of Heroku. PHP is cheap for hosting, expensive for developing. What's more important to you?
You can Google the differences between Python / Ruby. They're roughly the same, with Python requiring you to be more explicit while Ruby tends to do a little more "magic". Also, whitespace code blocks is a deal breaker for some people. I like Python more.
Heroku is free for a single web worker and a small shared database. They're built on top of AWS and charge a premium for the convenience of abstracting away dev ops. It's cheaper to use AWS directly or using a VPS, but at a time cost. How much time do you really want to spend doing dev ops rather than working on your core product?
I would worry about the web app first, then expose an API for use with mobile apps when it comes to it.
Web app development is drastically different from enterprise code. It's about constant iteration and deployment, scaling if necessary. Breaking out of your Java comfort zone will also help you grow as a programmer. You're going to have to learn HAML / LESS / JavaScript anyway for the front end.
CoffeeScript... That way, when your console tells you you've a JS error on line X, you need to check the code output by CS, and locate whatever code you wrote that could have generated the relevant lines, all the while coping with the fact that CS doesn't cover 100% of JS, and introduces its own set of bugs and quirks on top of those in JS. Good luck with that in the long term.
Given the description of what he wants to do I would encourage him to use a framework. Web Frameworks are setup to do what he described.
Parent was me, forgot to log in
Almost all the sites I've built are written in Java. Stick with Java. I've written sites in PHP and I've also had to work on updates to some PHP sites. If you're already familiar with Java dealing with PHP will feel like a joke. PHP is great when you don't want to write your own software since there are so many publicly available stuff out there in PHP. Don't worry, you won't find a lack of Java libraries that will do anything you want to do.
Don't bother trying to learn a new language because you'll just slow yourself down trying to learn the semantics of the language instead of the details of the new libraries you'll be using. I know java gets a bad wrap in terms of performance but I've always found that Java kicks PHP's ass in terms of performance in the tests I've done.
The main issue with java is that when you're using a servlet container like Tomcat, the process runs constantly and takes up memory. It's not that much but it's hard to find Java hosting because the memory issues makes it hard for a webhost to put thousands of websites on the same server.
Your best bet is going to be to find a cheap VPN when you get started but check the big webhosts to. I remember LunarPages used to offer JSP support in the past.
There are a bunch of different frameworks. Stick to ones that are popular because you'd rather have some limited functionality now rather than an unsupported framework in the future. Which has happened to me.
I believe right now that's Spring but Struts is still pretty popular too.
I've found NetBeans to be a great IDE and it supports Spring.
Most importantly, stop listening to strangers like me.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
For the general public, it will be a site where they can view upcoming events, filter them by type, date etc. and view details of events they're interested in. There will also be an admin section to the app where organizations who want to post their events can log in and set them up.
Doesn't Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and RSS feeds already have this down? You may want to consider using API's that hook into existing infrastructure rather than reinventing the wheel.
Google is not a PHP/Python shop. The four development languages are C++, Java, Python, and Go.
Gmail is indeed written in Java.
Google Web Toolkit.
While I do understand your point (and agree to a certain extent), frameworks usually provide you a nice set of consistent components that have been used and TESTED by a ton of people before you. Shure there are bugs, and for simpler applications they may be overkill, but you also get the benefit of a (mostly) tried-and-true library. If your task is designing an application, it makes no sense wasting your time developing, testing and debugging every single core funcionality you need (eg. database api, routing, caching, locale handling, etc). If even the code produced by some (very smart) framework programmers has bugs after extensive testing and usage by third parties, imagine your own code.
Any of the Gawker Media websites, some times you have to reload t hem 3 times to get the fricking hyperlinks to work.
A little tangent....
Gawker's websites suck in other ways that relate to usuability too. I use noscript religiously, there is nothing about the gawker websites that need javascript, but all you get is a nearly blank page if you don't enable javascript. UNLESS you change your brower's user agent to something Gawker doesn't recognize as supporting javascript (I change mine to an old version of googlebot). Then they send you pages that work perfectly well without javascript.
So clearly they can do non-javascript pages, but if they recognize your browser they won't give them to you and even worse, they won't even explain what's going on, it just silently fails with a blank page. They can't even be bothered to tell you to enable javascript, which is really just pathetic.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I second countach74.
Python, or my personal preference Ruby, are vastly superior choices. Django and Rails are intentionally -- and more to the point, well -- designed to be friendly web frameworks, built on top of their respective languages.
I don't even call PHP a "language". It is just a hodgepodge of inconsistent utility functions bundled together. PHP was originally designed with the Web in mind, and only later added pretensions of being a general-purpose language, with Object Orientation kind of bolted on even later as an afterthought.
Because Python and Ruby are far more internally consistent than PHP (Ruby even more than Python, in my opinion), they are also easier to learn. However, learning the language and also the framework entails some serious work. That is just the nature of the beast... there is no getting around it. You need to know the language, the framework, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Nobody said serious web development was easy.
You're talking at cross purposes here. Obviously the front-end UI of any modern Web application is going to be written using a lot of JavaScript. Java, Python, and PHP -- and many other languages -- are primarily for the back-end code. Gmail is certainly not accessing its database or implementing IMAP and SMTP in JavaScript.
Breakfast served all day!
Maybe it was JavaScript after all?
At the USENIX annual conference last month, Gmail engineer Adam de Boor surprised the audience by noting that the company's Gmail service was written entirely in JavaScript, and that all of its code, around 443,000 lines worth, was written by hand.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/google-executive-frustrated-java-c-complexity-375
I dont care what language(s) and toolkit(s) you use on your backend. But when you get ready to send code to my web browser, send HTML.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.