Next up was Rod Cope's session about Groovy. Has support for closures, which is good. Rod showed that Groovy is very simple to use for scripting ant builds. Generally it looked quite complete. It is slated to ship at the end of Q3 this year. Performance is 20-90% of Java, depending on use. Ready for small, non-mission-critical projects, according to Rod.
Maybe scripting languages like Groovy are perfect for stringing together SOA applications? It makes that glue code very tight, and should be flexible enough to not be in the way when stringing together services.
At 4 pm started the RAD for the Java Platform Web Tier: Frameworks Panel Discussion session. Trails, Grails and RIFE were covered by one of their developers. First out was Grails, built on Spring, Hibernate and Groovy. Is perfect for prototyping, or simple CRUD applications. Quote: To make the complex jobs simple and the simple jobs ludicrous.
Next out was RIFE, which uses HTML templates (yay). Described as having a full stack. The architecture was pretty intimidating. Said to be well fitted for groups of people willing to build components, and for typical CRUD applications.
Finally we had Chris Nelson, the creator of Trails. He was, like everyone else, inspired by Rails. Anyway, Trails builds on top of Hibernate, Tapestry and Spring. The idea is to develop the domain model, and you get your CRUD application for free. You get free web pages for many-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. Also support for Validation, Security and i18n. No code generation. Does build on top of other frameworks, which is the total other way around from RIFE. I must say I prefer the Trails approach. Fits best for portions of other larger apps, as well as "Good enough" software.
Then followed various questions and answers, where Trails stood out, I think, as the best solution. But I'm biassed here, since I was on the Trails mailing list from the very beginning. I know Trails much better than Grails and RIFE. To me, the Groovy part of Grails scares me away. It is, after all, a new language I would have to learn. The full-stack approach of RIFE is also a non-starter to me. I don't want to bet on a whole new stack. Trails' approach to build on top of other frameworks seems much better.
Correction about the Google Web Toolkit: It doesn't seem to require a servlet container, just a web server, since what it generates is just HTML and JavaScript.
