Those of you that read this blog regularly will know that I have been moaning about Java web development for a while because it takes more time setting stuff up than it does actually coding the thing and it puts me off. I have been threatening the world that I would be working on my own framework but I now may not have to because Guice actually seems to have most of the things that I was looking for. I am going to take a further look and see if their are any more cool things or any concerns.

It fits well with the new Java app engine api as you would expect and the very cool thing I liked is GWT with GIN that can actually compile your modules/injections to Javascript so that they can be used to write the client side interface. I found that rather cool. There are a few pieces missing such as the ability to compile down method injections but in the video they confirmed this is coming soon. I now think that the app engine has finally reached the stage where I would be interested in releasing apps onto it and would recommend it to others. Yeah there are plenty of concerns about data privacy but the same can be said with any cloud environment and especially one that is hosted in the USA. As far as I see it, as long as your app is not storing data critical to national safety I don’t see a problem

So, I am currently setting it up, will write an app, release it onto the app engine and write something about it here with any insights I may have.

It is worth noting though that if I were writing software that was ultimately critical (such as banking software etc) I would not use anything else (.Net would be suitable but it would take a while for me to get to the same level of experience) because this is where all that configuration and power makes sense and allows applications to scale easily, allowing disparate groups from different locations to easily work on the software. The sheer amount of professional tools available for Java projects is also amazing and I have gotten so use to some of them that when writing in another language I miss them. Eclipse is a god send (Netbeans is not too shabby either) and I miss it greatly when working in other languages. This even includes when an eclipse plugin is available to use. They are just never as polished as the standard Java editor, even though a lot of them are very good (so don’t take this as some sort of insult).

Let’s face it, in reality most web applications that you work on these days are relatively simple in nature. Usually you are taking information -> processing -> displaying in some simple fashion. For this kind of use why would you need to be running a JEE server + Spring + Framework(struts et al) + ….. ? Let’s face it, most companies ditch the full stack servers and go with a plain servlet engine (tomcat). For most projects it always seems like an overkill. I would prefer to see a very simple (but production capable) web server that is capable of running a variety of simple but powerful frameworks that adhere to some standard (like WSGI on python) all written in Java. I think this would increase the use of Java in the web space by a huge amount. Companies that trust Java would choose it over buzz word frameworks any day of the week and for good reason as well.

By the way, all this moaning does not mean that I am saying that any of the other languages or frameworks are rubbish. Quite contrary actually because they have managed to fill this gap that Java could have so easily filled years ago. In the end I decided to use RoR for my friends business just because I could start work on it immediately and show him results. Everyone seems happy with that. For the kind of app it is, it will never go crazy and need to scale like your facebook or twitter so that’s one less thing to worry about. The application has already been designed so that nothing is shared from the beginning allowing requests to be forwarded to any server providing enough scale for what it will be used for. Using RoR (would be the same with Django) I have managed to get the main application skeleton (different users, authentication, signups with verification/states/file upload, admin sections and much more) up and running within a week of working in my spare time. The last time I tried using Java it took this long just to get up and running.

Some of you might be shouting that it could be that I am lacking experience developing Java web apps, and you would be both right and wrong. I develop software for Java web applications all day long but, they have already been setup and I just add new functionality and fix bugs etc. But why is it that my most experience is with Java but I find it tiresome developing web apps for it? Yet I had no Ruby/Python experience at the time but found the whole experience developing with Rails/Django a much easier and enjoyable experience??

So what does all this mean?? Well if anybody is perhaps interested in rectifying this situation and working on a Java open source web server and framework then leave a comment expressing your interest. If we can get enough people interested (I am guessing about 3-4 people to start with) we might as well go ahead and do it ourselves. It would be interesting, we will learn loads and it will finally shut me up moaning about Java frameworks all the time.

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).