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Comment by arete | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for PHP but if you follow the usual Rails conventions for db structure, URL layouts, etc then it takes significantly less time to build (and maintain) a Rails site vs Java EE.

Simply collecting all of your Java libraries, frameworks, dependencies, etc and getting them running in your app server can take days. Minor changes like adding a db column can end up touching nearly every layer.

All these costs do have benefits. Java ORMs generate much more efficient queries than ActiveRecord, have more flexible querying, and better fit into existing schemas; JSP engines can render tens of thousands of pages per second; Java app servers are easily clustered; and much more. But most of that isn't something small or medium web apps use, so why pay the price?

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It doesn't take me days to get a Java web app up and running. It takes me minutes. In days, my Java web app is done.

I'm a senior engineer who codes for pleasure, so maybe I'm faster than average --- but if it's taking you days to get your libraries together and minor db changes touch every layer, you're doing something wrong.

I'm curious what your framework of choice is.

Spring, Spring MVC, SiteMesh, JSTL, JSP and iBatis.

Recently I started working on a new project using Tapestry 5.1 in GlassFish 3. That particular combination requires replacing GF's StAX lib with a different implementation that Tapestry depends on. Then there's the usual issue of reconciling the 2-3 different logging frameworks that various components depend on, writing the (albeit minimal XML descriptors for the app, web app, EJB, configuring resources in the app server admin console, etc.

It's unlikely you can do all that in minutes, so you're probably talking about copying an existing app template.

Adding a db column requires modifying the entity itself, DTOs, form beans, and of course the relevant JSP/templates. With Rails conventions you'd only modify the pages.

Do you like Tapestry?

For what it's worth I had a nightmare of a time with it. Especially Tapestry 5.0, 5.1. The documentation is atrocious and out of date. Also, it could have been a novice mistake that resulted from days of all nighters in a row, but I had a critical bug that prevented me from delivering that, as a TA later discovered, was resulting from my form validation occurring once for each form element on the page rather than executing once for the entire form.

I've just moved over to rails. After 6 years of using poor APIs tapestry 5 was what finally tipped me over the edge. On the project we used it for we would actually allow 2 days to get a tapestry page working correctly. Howard (creator of tapestry) seems to believe that html and http were a mistake and that he's created the event based solution to hide it away. The result, helped along by the lack of docs, is that even with what would have been the simplest of tasks with html and http become an impossible hunt through his dodgy codebase. Far and away the most painful framework I've ever had the misfortune to use. Worst part was that is was me that was seduced by the seeming simplicity of it and chose it in the first place ;)

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