Do world need a new Web Application development framework?
I’ve started to work for a new company 1 month and a half and a few days ago (1st of march). Company name is Componence (www.componence.com). We have started new office in L’viv, Ukraine with a new great team. I’m working in position of team leader here.
Componence works on bringing power of enterprise portals to big companies. We have own product and it’s named PortalSuite. It’s a set of portals for a WebLogic Portal server. It’s good enough to sell it. But now it’s time to build a new product for rapid portal development to respond for a new times coming.
CEO of our company wrote on his blog post about choosing a framework for our new product. And a lot of guys have responded to his posts on LinkedIn and other sites. All of them said about existing frameworks, their props and cons, but no one said it’s time to develop new framework.
All of existing and famous framework has been designed years ago. And goal for all of them was to provide easier way to build web applications, separate different kinds of logic and help to build UI more effectively. Sometimes ago they added some AJAX support (2 years ago or so). But now we have new big players on market of UI development frameworks for web applications – ExtJS and a Yahoo! UI. Both of them bring new way of abstraction for a building of web-based UI. And no one server framework consider on that.
So … I’m wondering is it a time to build a new server-side framework which will be integrated with ExtJS to bring new wave to web applications (portals) development?
Andriy Mykhaylyuk 
Hi Andriy,
I think there are always people who are thinking of building a new framework. But what’s the use of a framework if it’s not adopted by the developers community? My recent contacts with guys from Wicket taught me that they have a lot of contacts in the Open Source world and that their reputation is quite good. But still Wicket itself, like Tapestry and GWT a new generation compared with Spring-MVC and JSF, is trying to get a place in the developers world.
I think it’s worth while to look around on the internet and to try to find some people in the Open Source community to work on a new frame work. But be aware that they all do it beside their work as anyone should make sure that the next paycheck will come it next month. I’ve also read many cases where parts of development just delayed or are never finished because there was just no time.
You can trust that I’ll make sure that we at Componence try to make enough money to keep everyone going and to give new people like you chances.
Good to see you online Andryi!
Hi Andryi,
It’s me again, but maybe you should also use LinkedIn like I do. Just post a neutral question there with your arguments for a new framework, then you can better see what others think about it. And I would love to see all the other comments.
Bye, Ha
Hi Ha, nice to see you response 🙂
I’ve tried a lot of frameworks! I’m just thinking they didn’t use all power provided by the new UI frameworks like a YUI or ExtJS.
It can be not a new framework but a kind of specialization of existing framework to use client side libraries more effectively.
BTW: Tapestry is not best one for my opinion because they use event-based model. And it’s a little bit common to model of ASP.NET. Even Microsoft is working now on ASP.NET MVC framework. Check out http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/tags/MVC/default.aspx
My favorite one currently is a Seam 🙂
P.S.: I like new architecture you’ve provided in presentation and have a lot of suggestions we should consider on. I’ll contact you.
Hi all, I’m doing the same think and have the same doubt….we are creating a J2EE web development framework based on ExtTLD, struts, hibernate…I already tried grails, django, sympony, akelos…maybe it’s too late to develop a new one and
But I think also that the goal is to build a framework based on the skills and know-how of our current employes.
regards,
Ale