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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."
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
GWT is good if you want to create a RIA, when the presentation logic is so complex developing it in javascript is a nightmare, but without having to use Flash or silverlight. If the presentation is simple enough however, I would stick to HTML5 + jQuery. In fact the "simple enough" bar in that last statement is gradually pushed forward.
As a rule of thumb I'd say if you have a lot of moving parts on the page and you are basically creating a desktop application inside the browser ala Google docs, then consider GWT. Otherwise it will do more harm than good.
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.
Google is not a PHP/Python shop. The four development languages are C++, Java, Python, and Go.
Gmail is indeed written in Java.