play for websites vs applications

[Josh Kamau]

Dear players;

In my opinion, there are 2 types of web applications: Websites and web applications (with more forms and tables than text and images...  ) .

I find it easier to create dynamic forms and tables with sorting, searching  etc with a component framework (apache wicket) . I also find it easier to create websites with play framework.

Considering my rough distinction between websites and web applications, can i say that play is more suitable for websites (the kind that php, rails ... were meant for)  than business web applications (think of a web based accounting application with alot of tables, forms ...)

regards.
Josh.

[Pascal Voitot Dev]

when you see the number of classes/mapping/annotation/xml you have to write with a classic JEE framework, I don't see any reason not to use Play for the web layer!
 
Pascal

regards.
Josh.

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[Tom Carchrae]

I'd love to hear why you don't think it is useful for 'web apps'.  I build mostly web-apps and I can't see any reason it isn't great there.  I especially like the promise of a more efficient server side.

Please tell me what rocks I'm about to sail onto!  :) 

Tom

[Josh Kamau]

I have decided to put the question in SO where the audience is more diverse . See here

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7866186/play-framework-suitability-for-websites-and-web-apps

[Pascal Voitot Dev]

aren't we objective? XD

I hear this kind of arguments since the beginning of my professional life. In 2000:"Java is good for writing web applets but it's not for real men writing real-life business apps" ... 5-6years ago, it was:"Spring is for small apps and kids playing in a sandbox, JEE is for real men writing real-life business apps"... Now new things appear coming from Internet/mobile/distributed web and people tend to say:"This is good for those funny people from the web writing apps in one week to earn money by throwing crazy birds on pigs... it's not for real men writing real-life business apps"... let's meet again in 5years :D

Pascal

[Josh Kamau]

Thanks for your feedback Pascal ::

:"This is good for those funny people from the web writing apps in one week to earn money by throwing crazy birds on pigs... it's not for real men writing real-life business apps"

This is exactly my feeling. I actually have a play website i going live soon. I really had fun working with play but i feel i will not be able to achieve some of the things i have been able to do with wicket. I am not  javascript Ninja, may be thats my problem. I wish i could see a wider variety of applications on what people have been able to do with play framework.

Josh.

[Pascal Voitot Dev]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Josh Kamau <joshn...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for your feedback Pascal ::

:"This is good for those funny people from the web writing apps in one week to earn money by throwing crazy birds on pigs... it's not for real men writing real-life business apps"

This is exactly my feeling. I actually have a play website i going live soon. I really had fun working with play but i feel i will not be able to achieve some of the things i have been able to do with wicket. I am not  javascript Ninja, may be thats my problem. I wish i could see a wider variety of applications on what people have been able to do with play framework.

what couldn't you do with play that you could do with wicket?
wicket was good 2 years ago compared to existing JEE stuff but nowadays I feel like I must write everything twice if I had to use it so I'm not really a supporter of it even if I know people who really like it)
 

[Josh Kamau]

Pascal:

Are you saying that play is the ultimate java solution to all types of web based applications?

Or i put it this way: Are there some types of web applications that play is not BEST suited for?

[Pascal Voitot Dev]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Josh Kamau <joshn...@gmail.com> wrote:

Pascal:

Are you saying that play is the ultimate java solution to all types of web based applications?

Not at all, I just say it does what I had expected for years: it brings the RAILS approach into java world while keeping everything I love in the Java world ie the great opensource libraries entreprise/production-ready.
Moreover, I really think people from the server side (such as me) see web applications from the server side: heavyweight and ultra robust and too generic IMO (you can do everything but not really what you want)... People from the pure web-side have the other problem: they see servers from the web side and generally when people from the serverside see their vision of servers, they are horrified because it's not really robust and standard.
Let's do a caricature:
- Web people wrote great (and complex) webapps but poor servers
- Server people wrote great servers but poor webapps
It's time to stop this and take the best of breed of both approaches... Play steps clearly into this direction.
 

Or i put it this way: Are there some types of web applications that play is not BEST suited for?

It just depends on your context, the people you work with or for... if you spend years in training people in JSF/Spring and you wrote everything with it, it's clear that you won't rewrite everything in Play right now, it would be mad. But for new apps which are not yet strategic, why not try to invest in Play!
For the rest, yes Play is good for pure webapps but I really think writing a web layer with a big entreprise backend would be well suited to Play!
Moreover, when Play2 will be out with compiled templates, it will really be interesting. Byebye JSF tags with orthographic errors in an attribute that crashes with 10 pages of exceptions after a 30seconds redeploy.

Anyway, this is just my vision of old Java developer who has been hitting his head hundred times against JEE frameworks because instead of doing things he had to do, he just spent days to understand them or just to make them work or to maintain them. When I find something like play, I feel like breathing directly out of an oxygen bottle ;)
 

[Dominik Dorn]

If it comes to lot of forms etc. I actually find JSF2 better suited than play,
but for everything else, play is my favorite.

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 3:34 PM, Pascal Voitot Dev

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Dominik Dorn
http://dominikdorn.com
http://twitter.com/domdorn

Skripten, Mitschriften, Lernunterlagen, etc. findest Du auf
http://www.studyguru.eu !

[Pascal Voitot Dev]

arglll JSF2 :D... vade retro satanas :D

[Rakesh Waghela]

too many forms and similar data driven stuff?

You need something like SmartGWT which keeps your web layer separate from service layer.
Create Restful Service layer using Play ! and make complex data heavy UI using SmrtGWT !

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3471260/consuming-rest-services-with-smartgwt

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7521631/use-smartgwt-with-playframework

http://technowobble.blogspot.com/2010/08/using-smartgwt-with-jersey-restful.html

http://helpdesk.objects.com.au/java/how-do-i-generate-dynamic-urls-with-smartgwt-and-restdatasource

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2818391/smartgwt-restdatasource

http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/GWT/RestfulDataSourceSampleSmartGWT.htm

[sas]

Perhaps for a web app with lots of forms, complex interaction, and
state to be maintaned on the server side for thw whole transaction,
you could feel more confortable working with gwt (or smartgwt), pretty
similar to developing a desktop swing application.

you could certainly do it with jquery (or whatever library you like)
widgets on javascript, but you would loose java's type safety
umbrella...

that is, I wouldn't use play if you want to develop with a higher
level of abstraction from the http context. in that case I would look
for a stateful, component based, framework...

saludos

sas

On 23 oct, 15:31, Rakesh Waghela <javain...@gmail.com> wrote:
> too many forms and similar data driven stuff?
>
> You need something like SmartGWT which keeps your web layer separate from
> service layer.
> Create Restful Service layer using Play ! and make complex data heavy UI
> using SmrtGWT !
>

> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3471260/consuming-rest-services-wi...
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7521631/use-smartgwt-with-playfram...
>
> http://technowobble.blogspot.com/2010/08/using-smartgwt-with-jersey-r...
>
> http://helpdesk.objects.com.au/java/how-do-i-generate-dynamic-urls-wi...
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2818391/smartgwt-restdatasource
>
> http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/GWT/RestfulDataSourceSampleSmartGWT.htm

[Pascal Voitot Dev]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 1:41 PM, sas <ope...@gmail.com> wrote:

Perhaps for a web app with lots of forms, complex interaction, and
state to be maintaned on the server side for thw whole transaction,
you could feel more confortable working with gwt (or smartgwt), pretty
similar to developing a desktop swing application.

you could certainly do it with jquery (or whatever library you like)
widgets on javascript, but you would loose java's type safety
umbrella...

that is, I wouldn't use play if you want to develop with a higher
level of abstraction from the http context. in that case I would look
for a stateful, component based, framework...

I still wonder when we still need a stateful framework... the cases are really rare actually!
 

saludos

sas

On 23 oct, 15:31, Rakesh Waghela <javain...@gmail.com> wrote:
> too many forms and similar data driven stuff?
>
> You need something like SmartGWT which keeps your web layer separate from
> service layer.
> Create Restful Service layer using Play ! and make complex data heavy UI
> using SmrtGWT !
>

> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3471260/consuming-rest-services-wi...
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7521631/use-smartgwt-with-playfram...
>
> http://technowobble.blogspot.com/2010/08/using-smartgwt-with-jersey-r...
>
> http://helpdesk.objects.com.au/java/how-do-i-generate-dynamic-urls-wi...

>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2818391/smartgwt-restdatasource
>
> http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/GWT/RestfulDataSourceSampleSmartGWT.htm

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[Adam]

I've used Wicket and Play extensively for two different but fairly
complex webapps.

Currently we have developed our SaaS webapp and the website that sells
it with Play. We have a number of forms and complex interactions and
it was far easier and quicker to do it in play than in any other
framework I've ever used.
Our website is: https://mijura.com/ - there are screenshots and a demo
of the app as well.

My experience with Wicket was far different. Maintaining state is a
huge overhead and I'm not sure it's worth it. In many cases I think
you can redesign or rethink your problem so that it is stateless,
which will help it scale far better than any statefull app. My main
problem with wicket was that every request locked the request/request
tree for that session - effectively making the app single threaded for
a particular user. This made long running requests hard to deal with
as delayed all subsequent requests.

The amount of code required in Wicket to do simple things was also
annoying and it's templating language wasn't nearly as concise as
groovy in play.

All in all, it's hard to imagine using another Java web framework for
either an app or a website. Dynamic forms, tables and searching are
just as easy in play (search plugin, data tables, lots of javascript
stuff) and much more fun.

On Oct 25, 10:53 pm, Pascal Voitot Dev <pascal.voitot....@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Pascal Voitot Dev]

+1111 :D
exactly the same feeling even if I certainly didn't push as far as you the experience with Wicket!

[Josh Kamau]

Adam,

Your application is very inspiring.  Am in.

[Steven Elliott Jr]

As long as there are web frameworks there will be these kinds of totally subjective questions. There is nothing that Play! can't do that Wicket or XYZ framework can't also do; it comes down to how you want to perform your work. I have used Play! now (in an enterprise-type-business *GASP*) for two applications and the experience has been a total pleasure. I see no reason why you can't use Play! for whatever your needs are as long as you're able to work outside the lines sometimes. I used to hear this kind of debate with Rails all the time; Is Rails better for web apps or websites? What's the difference!?! A framework is just that, a framework for facilitating the monotonous tasks of web development; sometimes you're going to have write some code to work around things, also there are myriad modules to help you along the way. Having a web framework does not excuse you from understanding what is going on under the hood and learning how to plug modules in and work around things sometimes.

If you really have a ton of forms to create then by all means go ahead and use some horrid GUI tool that will create tons of boilerplate code that you will never catch up with. I know it's hard to hear it but I'd rather spend some extra time actually writing my own forms the way I want so that later I can maintain the application or pass it on to someone else to maintain :). Sometimes it's also just nice to step out of Java/Scala for awhile and work with some HTML/CSS/JQuery or whatever your JS library is.

My $.02

Steve

[Adam]

Thanks Pascal and Josh.

Glad you like our app, it took about 4 months of development for the
first version and then 4 months of iterating over the design /
improving it. Which we felt that was pretty quick for what we were
able to produce.

There is another discussion on multi-tenancy support that might be
useful if you are building a SaaS app:
http://groups.google.com/group/play-framework/browse_thread/thread/61626fe29b4cca6b

Enjoy and have fun!

On Oct 26, 2:54 am, Josh Kamau <joshnet2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Adam,
>
> Your application is very inspiring.  Am in.
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Pascal Voitot Dev <
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> pascal.voitot....@gmail.com> wrote:
> > +1111 :D
> > exactly the same feeling even if I certainly didn't push as far as you the
> > experience with Wicket!
>

> > On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Adam <a...@mijura.com> wrote:
>
> >> I've used Wicket and Play extensively for two different but fairly
> >> complex webapps.
>
> >> Currently we have developed our SaaS webapp and the website that sells
> >> it with Play.  We have a number of forms and complex interactions and
> >> it was far easier and quicker to do it in play than in any other
> >> framework I've ever used.

> >> Our website is:https://mijura.com/- there are screenshots and a demo

[peper]

Play is for me in the same bag as Ruby on Rails and Django but
better :-) I'm developing rather complex apllications with Spring and
JSF 2.0 (PrimeFaces) and I think it is good choice. I tried Vaadin (on
GWT) but the complex UI made client code so heavy, that it kills
Firefox on some computers, and works rather slow in Chrome and Opera.
That makes me not trust GWT. I won't use Play here either - JSF does
lot for me. On the other hand I'd never try to write public website
with JSF2. Play is great here!

On 25 Paź, 23:23, Adam <a...@mijura.com> wrote:
> Thanks Pascal and Josh.
>
> Glad you like our app, it took about 4 months of development for the
> first version and then 4 months of iterating over the design /
> improving it.  Which we felt that was pretty quick for what we were
> able to produce.
>
> There is another discussion on multi-tenancy support that might be

> useful if you are building a SaaS app:http://groups.google.com/group/play-framework/browse_thread/thread/61...

>
> Enjoy and have fun!
>
> On Oct 26, 2:54 am, Josh Kamau <joshnet2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Adam,
>
> > Your application is very inspiring.  Am in.
>
> > On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Pascal Voitot Dev <
>
> > pascal.voitot....@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > +1111 :D
> > > exactly the same feeling even if I certainly didn't push as far as you the
> > > experience with Wicket!
>
> > > On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Adam <a...@mijura.com> wrote:
>
> > >> I've used Wicket and Play extensively for two different but fairly
> > >> complex webapps.
>
> > >> Currently we have developed our SaaS webapp and the website that sells
> > >> it with Play.  We have a number of forms and complex interactions and
> > >> it was far easier and quicker to do it in play than in any other
> > >> framework I've ever used.

> > >> Our website is:https://mijura.com/-there are screenshots and a demo