Friday, September 23, 2011

Java based web frameworks

A quick rant on the state of web based frameworks in the J2EE world
a. Imposing Maven on me is not nice.
b. If your "web" based framework cannot support clean URL's you are in the wrong business when you are writing frameworks
c. A J2EE standard doesn't mean its a good standard (JSF - Im looking at you)
d. When you want a view technology please please use JSP. Its mature and it works. It is as good or as bad as you want it to be. Making your own template language which is either inflexible or just as bad as JSP is just plain silly. Reinventing JSTL with a different archaic syntax is silly. Doing it in the guise of "no java in JSP" is silly - There isn't a framework that I can't write bad code in.
e. Make simple things simpler and make hard things easier if possible and it's ok if hard things remain hard. But do not make simple things simpler(oh look how quickly I can do CRUD) and hard things harder(because lets face it , every application does have corner cases).  Do not make hard thing's simpler and simple things harder (I have to set up how many files for Hello World?) - because lets face it not everything in a web application is Rocket Science.
f. Who would have thought Spring would turn out to be more heavyweight than EJB.
g. Who would have thought that Struts 1 would still be so heavily used
h. Who would have thought that I would now prefer to code in ASP.net than identify which Web Framework I should use.