Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Use Grails - http://grails.org.

You will need to know Java/Groovy. Groovy can be considered a superset of Java (not 100% technically true, but easy enough to think of that way to get started).

> grails run-app

will run grails in dev mode on its own tomcat.

> grails prod run-app

will run grails in production mode on its own tomcat.

You can proxy Apache on port 80 to the tomcat port (default 8080).

Grails uses Hibernate under the hood, but hides it pretty darn well - you generally won't need to know much about it, or even touch any XML config files - to get started.

You can slowly add more Java libraries as required.

http://www.grails.org/plugin/jaxrs - this is a JAX-RS plugin for Grails which lets you use Jersey as the implementation if you want to ("At the moment, plugin users may choose between Jersey and Restlet as JAX-RS implementations").

The "Play!" framework might be interesting to you too, if you already know some Java, but I prefer Grails overall.

I second that Grails advice. Jersey, Hibernate and Maven isn't that bad, but Grails beats that anyday if you don't mind Groovy. While Play framework is cool too if you want to stick with Java, but it is not as mature as Grails or any other Java frameworks.

I was going to go in to a bit more detail, and this might be the place.

All your own code in Grails can be 'plain Java' if you want (or pretty darn close to it). The nice thing is the Java people who want to stick with Java can do that in Grails, or you can go pretty deep in to Groovy if you want.

Grails uses Maven and Hibernate, but you don't need to become masters in them before you start being productive.

This is why I like Grails so much - I've been able to be productive from a very early stage. The more I learn about the under the hood tools, the more productive I become, but I didn't need to understand or configure Hibernate, Sitemesh, Maven or Tomcat to get going. Now that I know more about them, it's even better, but it's great to jump in and have a working app early on (even if it's pretty basic).

Perhaps others learn differently, but Grails has been a great 'on ramp' to Java for me.

Well if you are going to jump out of Java then Scala should be a consideration as well. Even the Groovy creator commented that had Scala existed he would probably not have created Groovy. Wit Scala you can still use JAX-RS.

http://www.yes-no-cancel.co.uk/2009/05/13/building-go-test-i...

Well Scala existed at that time (2003), but that's not what he'd said. If someone had showed him a 2008 book on Scala in 2003, he'd have not created Groovy.

All that said, Strachan isn't really involved in Groovy and hasn't been for many years, so I'm not sure his views on the language or its appropriateness is of that much concern. A whole new team of people have been running with Groovy for years, and continue to make it better and more useful to people.

Scala is different enough from Java that syntactically that it's a hard sell for many. Groovy is far more Java-ish for Java devs to pick up, and as such I think it will continue to have a growing userbase for the foreseeable future (but I'm biased, as I run groovymag.com!)

Yeah, after re-reading my comment it comes off a lot more rude than was my intention. The point was to say that Scala is a really nice modernized "Java" (I know it is not but for simplicity, that is what I am going to call it) and that even the creator of Groovy thinks it has one of the most elegant designs out of the pack of Java replacements.

NP - I didn't take it as rude. Just wrong ;)

I don't see how recommending looking at Scala can be factually right or wrong, your bias may be influencing your bering there. The elegance of a language is subjective. The fact that Grooves founder finds it elegant lends credence to the fact that it is a popular opinion. Still no more right or wrong.

The ;) is a wink - was meant to indicate to take it lightheartedly (aka a joke).

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