More NFJS

Peter Aitken has a good account of August’s No Fluff Just Stuff event in London here. I also have more observations.

Grails

Just as I previously had not bothered to look at Groovy, I didn’t previously see the point of Grails, given Rails. Again, maybe I was wrong. Reasons for considering Grails:

• it sits easily on a JVM, if that is what you need to use. Unlike JRuby, it compiles completely down to bytecode.
• being Groovy it can integrate with Java Code with fewer seams.
• it is layered on top of Spring and Hibernate, enabling use of Hibernates mature and reputedly excellent caching mechanisms.

I should admit that I haven’t yet used Grails in anger, so I can’t really vouch for it properly.

RIFE

RIFE is yet another Java Web Framework. It distinguishes itself by not only achieving “Rails-like” constraints in Java but by actually implementing Continuations for control flow. Which all goes to show what you can achieve if you really try.

AOP

AOP is another thing that I never so enough point in to really try out, beyond a few well-defined cases such as marking transaction boundaries. Brain Sletton introduced AOP as a tool for enforcing or monitoring policies, such as class A can only be called from classes B or C. Now this seems to be a very Directing rather than Enabling tool. My impressions was strenghtened when Brian suggested that the Junior developers could be left to write the main code, while the senior developers (architects) controlled them with AOP.

To be fair, though, he did give quite a compelling example of using AOP for good, using it to detect all the places in an inherited Swing application where threading had been incorrectly used.

Full stack frameworks

Most of the web frameworks presented, Grails, Rife, JBoss Seam were full stack. I’m guessing this is a move away from the complexity, integration issues, and burden of choice of the mix and match approach that previously held sway in Java land.

Bending Java

Of the two pure Java language sessions that I attended, AOP and Rife, both involved bending Java to be other than it was designed using byte code jiggery pokery. If you need to do that kind of thing to get the language to behavae close to how you’d like, maybe you’re using the wrong language.

Sunday, September 16, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments