weapon of choice

Being a one-man development team and on a self-financing position, tools I would be using would make or break this project. For one, on the development side, it would be wise to make use of as many uhmm commercially-liberated, stable, and ready to use frameworks to give the project a head start. Time is the greatest obstacle at the moment. Doing this on my spare time, I could only do so much software development. Product development and marketing strategy need as much, if not more, attention. I would gladly turn to my usual Java EE stack if it wasn’t that time consuming and with horrible verbosity. I have to face the fact that yeah, it’s just too much work for one guy, at least at this stage.

Enter the rapid web apps development frameworks. I know this is the way to go, at least for the moment. This would jumpstart the exploration stage. There were three obvious choices for me. Ruby on Rails, Seam Framework, and Grails.

I tried RoR for a few days. It was a great introduction for this new trend in web apps development. Now this is what convention over configuration truly is. Code generation felt natural and easy. The only uncomfortable thing about it though is that I am still a Java developer by day. I miss a lot of familiar tools that I anticipate would be handy now or in the future. I can’t quite capitalize on my current skillset in this path.

I tried looking into JBoss Seam the first time it was announced. I wasn’t too sure what to make of it then. I felt it was just one big JEE stack, no different from doing a chopsuey approach. It’s only recently that I realized that it was geared towards the web app rad space as well. Looks rock solid. Making use of JEE specs. But being in the Spring camp all these years, it felt kinda weird. Also, from my dabling with RoR, it felt there’s still too much work involved.

Finally, Grails. First, Groovy the language rocks. It felt very natural using compared to my odd moments with Ruby. I won’t get into the dynamic vs static language parlance here, but fuck, I don’t get it why we stick with wordy and awkward language in the enterprise. Grails the framework has most of the Rails elements. It was just as easy. The big plus is the seamless integration with Java and all the tools and modules I’ve grown to love. So weapon of choice here. But not set in stone though.