ASK HN: Is it time to move from JAVA/Struts2 to Scala/Lift?

6 points·sinzone··3 comments

Hi folks, we're currently running a company that is builded in JAVA, about 50,000 loc. What do you think about moving to a more modern language? Especially to scale easier and hire better developers.

Thanks

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I'm not at all a Java fan, but how does shifting from Java to Scala help you scale easier? Scale what?

As to hiring better developers, I've never found that the language makes a difference in finding good developers, it is just that the smaller the community, the easier it is to find the good developers. I know many brilliant php, java etc developers but they are much harder to find when doing a blind job search than lisp, smalltalk etc ones because the community for php, java is so much larger.

I experience the same thing when looking for css/html people. It is hard to find the good ones because you get buried under a mountain of mediocrity when you go looking.

I have been programming in Java for 7+ years. I am responsible for several site that use struts 2 and Java. In the past year I have been moving toward groovy/grails. I have successfully integrated groovy scripts into production code running srtuts 2. I have also had success with placing an existing struts 2 application into a grails application. The beauty of groovy is that it is built on top of java and compiles to bitecode. Grails is just a convention over configuration approach to a groovy/spring/hibernate or jpa stack. You mantain complete control over all configuration.

For new development? Try it and see.

For a rewrite? that would be death. Don't sacrifice a product making money for a sexy new language.

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