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Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

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Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#31

Post by greentree »

kls wrote: post #17

"The Play framework makes it easier to build Web applications with Java" Maybe you should not be building web applications with Java or C# or . Maybe you should be building web services with these languages and using AJAX, a client side toolkit, Javscript, HTML and CSS to build a UI that communicates with said services. Maybe this decouples your UI implementation from your business logic implementation so you can go…

The "way we've always done it" in my brain does not like the thought of putting all the client stuff in, well, the client. I'd like to hear more about this style of development. Do you have examples of this being done, postmortems, blogs espousing this, more info, etc?

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#32

Post by steveklabnik »

kls wrote: post #17

"The Play framework makes it easier to build Web applications with Java" Maybe you should not be building web applications with Java or C# or . Maybe you should be building web services with these languages and using AJAX, a client side toolkit, Javscript, HTML and CSS to build a UI that communicates with said services. Maybe this decouples your UI implementation from your business logic implementation so you can go…

> A CMS can deliver already templated, flat HTML files, to the web server during build time.

This is actually how Jekyll works, which is what I use for my blog. It's pretty awesome, actually. My pages load basically instantly, and Disqus plus some other Ajaxy stuff works for what absolutly has to be dynamic.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#33

Post by kls »

steveklabnik wrote: post #32
kls wrote: post #17

"The Play framework makes it easier to build Web applications with Java" Maybe you should not be building web applications with Java or C# or . Maybe you should be building web services with these languages and using AJAX, a client side toolkit, Javscript, HTML and CSS to build a UI that communicates with said services. Maybe this decouples your UI implementation from your business logic implementation so you can go…

> A CMS can deliver already templated, flat HTML files, to the web server during build time. This is actually how Jekyll works, which is what I use for my blog. It's pretty awesome, actually. My pages load basically instantly, and Disqus plus some other Ajaxy stuff works for what absolutly has to be dynamic.

Thanks for the tip, I am always looking for a good CMS that does not try to be yet another app server.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#34

Post by bad_user »

kls wrote: post #26
bad_user wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A web service isn't a web application?

Neither is an IPhone app, but I can guarantee you that most of the logic I use for my "Web Application" will be reused by my IPhone application. With the exception of my templating, work-flow and UI specific logic, so it begs the question why am I implementing my templating, workflow UI specific logic, in my "Web Application" (it's not reusable). Unless it really is a web UI to my enterprise application in which my U…

Because this is a premature optimization.

I've seen companies falling at the other extreme ... making the interface "totally" decoupled, so that they could replace the UI anytime they wanted. That's why monstrosities like XSLT appeared.

But I haven't seen any example of a good application yet that does this successfully, because whether you like it or not, the web UI will require backend logic that your iPhone app does not, and vice-versa. And you'll either create a common denominator, or two different branches.

Also, if your iPhone app is so similar, maybe it shouldn't be an app in the first place, but an iPhone-optimized website. It's Apple's fault if they aren't making the integration between websites and the iPhone easier.

Don't get me wrong, web services have their place, but make no mistake ... a website that assembles the page from web services is a lot trickier to scale (assuming you're the one providing those services).

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#35

Post by modoc »

kls wrote: post #30
modoc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience breaking everything down into a bunch of uncoupled services, ala SOA, adds a significant amount of performance overhead making all these web service calls to build up a semi-complex page. Performing all the logic within a single process/JVM is MUCH more efficient. And that's with LAN based WS calls. I can't imaging doing that over the internet. You have a page that has 20 independent dynamic blocks,…

No one said that they have to be micro services. One should provide composite services that provide all of the data for a work-flow. Then use a pub-sub event based model to notify the UI of available data. This way components stay loosely coupled and are only listening for an event that injects the relevant data that they need. This results in a single call to a composite service yet the micro services are available…

Building/maintaining that sounds way more complex than writing a JSP.

In my experience, if you architect your server-side components well, if/when you want to expose something as a web service you can prop up a web service that's basically just a thin wrapper around the relevant backend component(s). It avoids the "premature optimization" of building everything as a bunch of micro and aggregate services that you may or may not actually make use of in the future.

For building a complex web page for a normal browser, (assuming you're using Java on the backend) a JSP built using various local component objects is almost certainly the fastest performance solution, both server side performance and client side perceived performance.

For building other interfaces (iPhone app, dashboard widget, etc...), until you build them you're unlikely to know exactly what calls will make the most sense for them. When you do, just build those calls as wrappers to your existing components. Very fast to do. I've done it many times against Seam and ATG eCommerce applications.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#37

Post by jshen »

kls wrote: post #26
bad_user wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A web service isn't a web application?

Neither is an IPhone app, but I can guarantee you that most of the logic I use for my "Web Application" will be reused by my IPhone application. With the exception of my templating, work-flow and UI specific logic, so it begs the question why am I implementing my templating, workflow UI specific logic, in my "Web Application" (it's not reusable). Unless it really is a web UI to my enterprise application in which my U…

seo

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#38

Post by volida »

kls wrote: post #17

"The Play framework makes it easier to build Web applications with Java" Maybe you should not be building web applications with Java or C# or . Maybe you should be building web services with these languages and using AJAX, a client side toolkit, Javscript, HTML and CSS to build a UI that communicates with said services. Maybe this decouples your UI implementation from your business logic implementation so you can go…

Maybe you should just use what makes the job best for you?

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#39

Post by kls »

greentree wrote: post #31
kls wrote: post #17

"The Play framework makes it easier to build Web applications with Java" Maybe you should not be building web applications with Java or C# or . Maybe you should be building web services with these languages and using AJAX, a client side toolkit, Javscript, HTML and CSS to build a UI that communicates with said services. Maybe this decouples your UI implementation from your business logic implementation so you can go…

The "way we've always done it" in my brain does not like the thought of putting all the client stuff in, well, the client. I'd like to hear more about this style of development. Do you have examples of this being done, postmortems, blogs espousing this, more info, etc?

http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture Being a large company Amazon is in different stages of a transition to this form of architecture, but for the most part most all of the large companies are moving towards it IBM is embracing it as a UI development philosophy. Google pioneered it, Yahoo is well on it's way.

http://blog.jeffhaynie.us/service-oriented-ui-architecture-i...

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#40

Post by jshen »

modoc wrote: post #29
mcav wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to refer to this: > "Play is designed to operate in a ‘share nothing’ architecture. The idea is to keep the application completely stateless. By doing this you will allow your application to run on as many server nodes as needed at the same time. >What are the common traps you should avoid to keep the model stateless? Do not store any object on the Java heap for multiple requests" If that's all they're talki…

I haven't done any real dev with those frameworks you list so I'm wondering how do you manage session state? user profile, shopping cart, breadcrumbs, multi-request flows, etc... Do you write/read all that into the db/memcached for each request?

typically your session data is stored outside of the web app process. It could be in files, memcached, db, cookies, etc.
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