I do like the idea of completely understanding your chosen framework though because having used a few now it is really annoying not understanding how some things work and having to read all the source code (if available) just to get an idea. That would probably be my biggest problem with Rails. All the “magic” gets in the way. I know that the “magic” is completely optional, but the problem is everyone gets used to it and show examples using it and then when you want to learn how to overwrite it you have to read the documentation, and most of the time the source code. That’s one reason for liking PHP as the magic is not there really and it is pretty easy to see where stuff is being loaded from etc. The truth is that I will never like any of them as much as I like Java though. I absolutely love to code in Java and I understand it more than any other language. My problem is that J2EE is just way too much – way way too much, especially for consumer applications. From what I have heard from Carl, he says that Spring is very good and I believe him as I have had a look at it in the past and was impressed.

I love some of the libraries available in Java and I am trying to integrate them into the framework, such as  Hibernate and apache logging among many others. My main purpose is trying not reinvent things too much. Why try to create n amazing web server? I mean if I spent enough time working on it I am sure that I could, but what’s the point when Apache is so good and has so many modules available for all purposes? I want to create a simple single threaded web server that I can then then cluster over an apache web server to create hopefully a more easily scalable framework, but at the same time really simple. I am going to be working on a few scripts that will easily create the clusters config files and also the start, restart and stop scripts based on the developers options, a bit like what can be done in Rails with mongrel. There are a few other tools out there that can be used that will monitor particular processes and report, restart or pretty much do whatever you want if they fail, stop or use too much memory. The main task that I have to do is write my own scripting language. I want this to be as simple as possible, and to be honest if there already exists a nice one (I have not yet looked) I will definitely consider integrating that. Although again, I would like to be able to do my own as I would then fully understand how it works and can quickly fix/update it. After all the framework is for me, not everyone else so I don’t really care what other people would say about what libraries I use.

Anyway, I will keep you up-to-date when things happen but don’t expect it to be any time soon. I am trying to actually find something which pays and this is not it (well not yet anyway – I wish )  plus it’s only for fun (but very interesting).