What do you use for web development and why you think it rocks? [closed]

Answer 1

I've been using TurboGears lately and absolutely love it. It competes with Django and Ruby On Rails for rapid development, but has a more flexible backend. That is, it's more of a collection of best-of-breed components that have been made to play well together than a single monolithic framework. You can easily swap out the object relational mapper if you need to, or replace the page templating language with something else without rewriting your entire application.

The real "where have you been all my life?" moment came when I spend about two minutes adding an AJAX autocomplete field to a form. I had to write a function to answer the AJAX requests and add a new field that called that function, and it worked perfectly the first time. I'd always wanted to play with AJAX but was a bit intimidated, and my first experience with it could not have been easier.

It has a 20 minute tutorial to make a functional wiki. Even if you don't think you'll be using it, read it or watch it and see how easy such a thing can be.

Answer 2

Stripes is an awesome framework because it lets you build your application quickly and easily, without maintaining configuration files. Typically, you create an action bean (a simple Java class) to do the work and a JSP to display the results. You add validation with annotations. You get built-in type conversion for most common types, and can easily write your own type converters. Interceptors give you a simple way to address crosscutting concerns. In short, I find that it's one of the most simple, intuitive, consistent, powerful and flexible frameworks out there.

For the rest of your stack, it's really up to you. It's easy to integrate Spring, Hibernate, JPA, AJAX, security, unit testing, etc. with Stripes. If you'd like to see some sample code that demonstrates all of this, get the code bundle for the Stripes book and open the index.html file for a list of all the examples. That way, you can get an idea of what a Stripes application looks like.

Best of luck in your project!

Answer 3

For java development, Eclipse or Net beans; For html/css/js netbeans and at times Dreamweaver to check browser support for properties; For xml/xslt/xsi Altova xml spy; For PNG files Adobe fireworks; For all general purpose text editing GVIM. And not to forget 'Firebug' and 'IE developer toolbar'.

Why they rock? code completion for java, tracability and WYSIWYG experience is what make them tick for me. Tomorrow if a new tool comes out and has a shorter learning curve, I wouldn't be shy!

Answer 4

Grails (http://grails.org) is probably the most interesting new web development environment today. It is built on top of the following:

Spring
Groovy
Sitemesh
Hibernate
Quartz

It's also extensible with plugins

http://grails.org/Plugins

You can watch a few of the screencasts to get an idea of the functionality.

http://grails.org/Grails+Screencasts

The one very appealing thing to me was that Grails can easily be integrated into an existing Java/JSP project. There's no need to rewrite the project from scratch.

I think Ruby on Rails would be a great option if you didn't have any legacy code or if Java wasn't your day job.

Finally, I like the idea of being able to deploy Grails projects to application servers such as Tomcat, WebSphere, Glassfish, etc. These systems are extremely reliable and they scale well.

Answer 5

Are you talking about a "web site" or something richer like a back office app (lots of controls and fields and complicated workflows)?

If you're talking a web site, something more content oriented, and you want to stick with Java, I vote Stripes -- it embraces HTTP in all (well, at least most) of its glory, it stays out of your way, and is very flexible. We've written a very nice framework on top of Stripes leveraging JSP and JSP Tag Files. We can knock out screens quite quickly.

If you have a more complicated application in mind, then consider one of the component frameworks. Wicket is quite popular, but JSF has a bunch of tooling and widgets, and works with Seam, which gets rave reviews.

Answer 6

If I were starting from scratch, I'd still look around at the team I was working with and see what they know. Platform that no one on your team knows is the wrong platform. For production work, stick with what you know, unless there is a pressing reason that you have to change.

If you are determined to learn something new, I'd suggest Ruby on Rails. In just a couple of years it has become one of the major milestones to compare other systems to: "I use xyz, it's like rails except..." That alone speaks to the kind of impact it has had on the web development community. Ruby gives you a hugely powerful server-side scripting language, and Rail allows for rapid development of high quality applications.