Terse Systems : J2EE Frameworks

September 30, 2005 03:08

Programming, Java, ATG Dynamo

I was confused about all the different frameworks, until I realized that many of them only attempt a small piece of the domain. I came back to it again once I felt confident I'd gotten past the hype. I haven't examined every solution closely, but so as far as I understand it, the current state of the art looks like this:

frameworks

If only DAS had been open-sourced 10 years ago. It could have been so different.

Currently playing around with AppFuse, the short way of saying for "I've got a sample application using all of this stuff integrated together, and it actually does work, if you use a code generation framework, use Tomcat, and don't poke around with it too much." Masses of documentation, but still a big pile of libraries. No conceptual integrity. And glue code to stick everything together. Argh.

Still, much better than last time I looked. They're getting there, but it's a long way to go yet.

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Hi, RIFE (http://rifers.org) is a full-stack J2EE framework that contains all of the pieces you identified and more, like scheduling, content management, authentication, testing, ...

You only need one jar, and get it all. Nicely integrated across layers but each layer is also usable standing alone.

Geert Bevin at 09/30/05 05:47

Spring Web Flow is a next generation page flow framework--extremely powerful. Definitely add that to your Page Flow list as it will make a major impact in that space.

Just a general comment about how Spring fits into this picture: Spring, as a whole, is more of a full-stack integration platform built from a set of best-of-breed components, than it is a provider of a single component. For example, Spring MVC and Web Flow are two products within the larger platform that Spring directly funds the development of, but Spring also integrates with and ships a number of other solid O/S components (like Hibernate for ORM and Quartz for Scheduling), integrating them into a consistent programming model driven by the Spring container (the service configuration framework) that provides the neccessary glue work. The entire Spring stack is professionally supported (by not just Interface21, but by major vendors such as BEA as well).

HTH,

Keith

Keith Donald at 09/30/05 12:25

appfuse 1.8.2 really rocks
been using for a while and it really delivers, besides it gives you the whole deve environment, with all the ant targets you need

carlos orrego at 09/30/05 05:34

That's one of the frustrations after working with Dynamo. All of the new open-source equivalents solve part of the problem in a decoupled fashion, so you have to write your own glue code to integrate them. Spring has some features from Nucleus, but then you have to add JMX, and they don't magically work together. (And JMX is a pale imitation of the admin console anyway.)

As you say, if they had just open-sourced DAS years ago (heck, if they were to open-source it when they EOL it soon) we'd be much better off.

Back in an earlier post, I didn't realise you were working at resto. That was my first Dynamo project, when I was a TA at Fort Point.

art at 10/02/05 02:29

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