Where do the rules engines fit in? Definite synergies with AOP & EJB/J2EE
Mar 09

Good code and web frameworks

Java, Tech, Web Frameworks Add comments

Hani has a fairly mild bile on “Is good code relevant?”.

It seems to have a couple of main points:

  • We are creating successful projects with code that is “good enough”.
  • We can create a successful projects using ANY technology (don’t have to use the latest and greatest).

This has definitely always been the case. As a consultant travelling to various dev shops in the US and London, I have found that 99% of projects are a few years behind with respect to the latest and greatest tools/techniques that we talk about on various forums.

This is fairly natural. If you build a fairly complex application using tool X, pattern Y, and library Z, and it works. Why change it? There has to be enough of a gain to refactor to make it worthwhile.

One example is the codebase for TheServerSide itself. We use EJB. We use Entity Beans. We use BMP Entity Beans. Yet it all works. It isn’t as pure as you would like of course…. we would love to get rid of the EJB layer and use a transparent persistence mechanism (and we will). But it works… and quite well in fact.

Carlos Perez also asked How many java web frameworks can you name?. He came up with a lot. Why are there so many frameworks out there in the Java community?

When people migrated to Java, we didn’t have any good frameworks. Everyone was working with a low level layer (Servlets and then JSP) so people started to abstract on top of these layers…. and frameworks were born. Again, at TSS we use our own custom MVC layer (as Struts and co didn’t exist at the time of writing). We would like to move to WebWork/Tapestry, but everything works fine, and it doesn’t give us THAT MUCH…. so it sticks around like a bad smell :)

We also probably haven’t found THE best way to do web development (if there even is one) so people keep experimenting :)

One Response to “Good code and web frameworks”

  1. matis skin care Says:

    thank

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