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Comment by wyqueshocec | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, the Spring one would take 10x as long to make, which means more developer cost and more feedback reaction time. Certainly not a deal breaker, but a cost/tradeoff one must consider.

Edit: clarity.

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As someone who recently came back to Java from a 5 year stint with Rails, I can safely say this is not true by any stretch of the imagination. If you stick to those tools in the Java ecosystem which meet your requirements, you can be incredibly productive.

The problem is that the Java world is full of over-engineered solutions which are really targeted at extremely large enterprise applications surrounded by a community of folks who like to menturbate about them. As a startup, you don't need to focus on those solutions. You'll not need 99% of them.

However, you can choose bit and pieces. I'm using Vaadin, JPA and Guice and finding it incredibly productive and am able to deliver functionality in far less time than it took me in Rails. I'm not using 90% of the Java EE stack, but it's available to me if/when I need it.

Rails was a great thing for the software development world. It drove convention over configuration and caused a lot of the competing technologies to pause and question why things were the way they were. But IMHO, managing the whole Rails stack (rails + coffeescript + css in our case) across a group of people became a chore. YMMV, but the statically-typed nature of Java along with the very capable technology stacks you can assemble have eased our daily jobs tremendously.

How are you finding Vaadin work out for you? What are you using it for? What version? The 6 series or the new 7 series?

So far, so good. It's very different from your typical template-driven approach. We have a decent amount of Swing experience, and developing with Vaadin feels similar (but much easier) than Swing.

If you are developing business-facing applications and not just consumer web sites, as we are, I think Vaadin makes a lot of sense. It might even make sense for consumer sites, but that's not our current target.

I should also say: putting together a new screen (form or otherwise) in Vaadin is extremely fast. It's the fastest I've ever been able to develop web-based UIs, simply because all I'm forced to think about is Java.

I see. I found it to be a little difficult in terms of dealing with data, especially messing around with the Table object. Best of luck to your project.

The JPAContainer and SQLContainer it provides makes this reasonably easy.

Rails is not great, IMO.

I use Spring every day as part of my day job, and I agree that a lot of the development time slowness is due to culture/enterprise. But that is a serious problem that can't be readily dismissed.

Do you have actual experience with developers of similar skill levels building a similar app in Spring and Rails?

While undoubtedly less expressive I think most of the bad rep Spring gets is because it's used in "Enterprise", which means programmers that are, if not of lower level, constantly interrupted and yanked around and told what not to do.

I wouldn't choose Spring anymore because there are better alternatives, but I'm pretty sure the 10x is in the programmer and not the framework. The framework might be 2x, if that, but not much more I think.

P.S. If you include Spring Roo then I'm pretty sure the 10x no longer holds, but I never got up to speed on Roo myself so I can't say anything authoritative on that.

Not rails. I've never used rails in a serious production application.

Oh sure, there are reasons to use an easier/faster-to-develop language, I believe every developer should know a 'hard-and-fast' language and a 'slow-and-easy' language... and know when to use them.

98% of the websites out there could run on python and I doubt we'd see a big performance difference.

However, I really don't think there exists a 10x difference developing in Spring. Hell, I don't think there is a 10x difference in using Struts vs Rails.

Spring development is considered slow as it brings images of enterprise shops taking several years to go through the bureaucratic red tape necessary to incorporate a new feature.

I've worked with plenty of small companies using Spring and their development/release cycle is maybe 1/2 or 1/4 the speed of comparable 'easier-to-build' technologies, but it definitely isn't 1/10th the speed to develop.

I chose that number because of this anecdote:

I worked at a start-up a few years ago. I worked on a PHP-powered website that spoke to a Java-powered (Spring/Hibernate) service layer. The PHP team consisted of one: me. The Java team consisted of over 10 engineers. I outpaced them easily and consistently.

In other projects with similar divisions, I've had similar experiences, though not always so dramatic.

I used to be a hired gun that would be called in occasionally to, like you, code circles around bigger teams when deadlines were tight.

Last few years however I decided to stick around with one of my clients for a while and I realized that quite a few of the employees I considered sub-par before were actually pretty decent programmers doing their best to do quality work in a dysfunctional environment.

I've since then learned to really appreciate this quote, which my gut tells applies to your situation as well:

"Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by bad management."

You're exactly right. I hope my comment didn't come across as critical to the engineers I worked with. Some of them are the best engineers I have ever worked with, and I have great respect for them.

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