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Comment by anatari | Hacker News Reader

If you're a web shop, IMO, none of the Java web frameworks are ideal for the fast prototyping that most startups need to do on a regular basis. I've hated every Java web framework I've ever worked with and I've used most of the popular ones. Always felt like I was fighting the framework for one reason or another; too verbose, not expressive enough or too tightly structured.

There are some decent platforms for the JVM though.

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The play framework sounds like something you'd be interested in. It abandons the Java conventions for a more rails like experience. http://www.playframework.org/

playframework is way better than rails in my opinion

No comments about the Lift framework ? FourSquare uses it

Watched the screencast. First thought when I saw 'SomeClass extends Controller': this will be hard to evolve.

Tapestry 5 has done away with this and does not require interfaces or superclasses anymore in order to avoid breaking the API in future releases, they should have learned from that.

Yeah, never heard of it until now. If I ever venture out into Java land again, I'll have to give it a better look. How does it compare to Grails?

I've never looked at grails so I can't offer an opinion but I have some links that may be helpful to you. The first is a HN discussion on the play framework and the second a discussion on google groups about the differences between the two frameworks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898738

http://groups.google.com/group/play-framework/browse_thread/...

You can use Play! with scala as well, so you get a good framework AND a more interesting language at the same time ;)

I think Anatari is right on the money. It seems like a lot of startups are web shops, which means Java may not be the best fit. But on the back-end, it's great. I would imagine that a lot of back-ends are initially written in some other language and then rewritten in Java (or another JVM language) when performance really counts.

Without exception this sentiment should not be reserved for just Java web frameworks, but rather the whole lot of server side web-frameworks. with the JavaScript/RIA tool-kits now maturing, there is no need to use a server side web framework for UI concerns.

With the clean separation of discipline that this creates, Java and a multitude of other languages are fine for providing the data and business services that said UI application communicates with.

Given Java's plethora of libraries available in the middleware layer, I do not know why someone would not consider it as a potential candidate for their service layer.

To be clear though, it is not only Java but the entire concept of assemble a screen on the server, push it to the client and then every action on the client requires a trip to the server to make a decision, was just plain bad design. All of these server frameworks are designed to write applications in that manner.

The web started as some people putting up pages, HTML forms where bolted on and then someone backed it with CGI/POST and the web application was born. Unfortunately, until the JavaScript/RIA frameworks came along, we had not moved the needle much past CGI/POST we just put some window dressing on it.

The decoupled JavaScript / HTML5 / CSS UI is now breaking the constraints of the old page-post model and the reality is the server side frameworks are rooted in the page-post model and are no longer a necessity.

Writing your own web framework in Java isn't rocket science ;)

did you try Tapestry 5?

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