Raible Designs

Tuesday February 15, 2005

Is Shale ready for primetime? Is Shale ready for prime-time and use in production applications? David Geary seems to think so:

My consulting job is pretty exciting. I'm using Shale heavily now, especially for wizards. Our application has both static wizards, for creating a new account, for example, and dynamic wizards that are generated from a description of an online-document.

Not only that, but he's going to be talking about it on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour this year.

To start the year, I'm doing three new presentations: "Shale: the next Struts", "Felix: a bag of tricks for JSF", and "Design Patterns: Tales from the server-side". Later on, I'll add two more presentations: in the near term, Killer Web UIs with Tiles and SiteMesh and a little later, a session on Laszlo.

I'm a huge believer in Shale. I have no doubt it's destined for great things, so I'm super-excited about the Shale session.

Now that I've talked about this, I'll probably be accused of caring more about Struts than the other web frameworks I use. In reality, I prefer most of the other frameworks in AppFuse and Equinox to Struts. However, at my current gig we're afraid to move from Struts because we're the only development group that hasn't fallen victim to the Big Blue umbrella. They've tried to make us use WebSphere, but we fought that off and continue to use JBoss. The fear is that if we don't use Struts, and use some lesser-known framework, they'll use that against us. That's why I like Shale - because it might be a way for me to use a more WebWork/JSF-type framework. Posted in Java at Feb 15 2005, 07:52:33 AM MST 8 Comments

Ruby on Rails vs. Struts Brian McCallister has put together a nice tutorial titled "Rails for Struts-ters (Part 1)". In it, he compares a Struts Action to a Rails ActionController (I think that's the right link).

After looking at the various introductory tutorials for RubyOnRails, a lot of people seem to come away thinking it is a simple CRUD framework -- mostly because of Scaffolding. A common theme seems to be, "well, it looks fast for slapping together a prototype, but when you need control, you it ain't there." I can see why people think that way, after watching the 10-minute video, and the reading the ONLamp tutorial. So here is a stab at a guided tour, using Struts as a point of reference.

Good stuff Brian - can't wait for the next tutorial. Posted in Java at Feb 15 2005, 07:44:54 AM MST Add a Comment