Colorado Springs Open Source Meetup (Web Frameworks)

Attended another Colorado Springs Open Source Meetup tonight. The first talk was on an open source WYSIWYG editor called KompoZer. Check it out if you like. Reminded me of Nvu which, as it turns out, seems what KompoZer was birthed from.

The second talk for the evening was on Web Frameworks by Matt Raible. Good speaker, both entertaining and humorous. The slides for his talk can be found here. He does a quick comparison of Grails/Rails backends with GWT/Flex frontends. The winner? There is none. It depends on your temperament and what works for you (or what fits best with how your brain is wired). Basically, you just need to spend some time reading and experiment with a few or all of them. There is plenty of material on the web to get you started.

I’ve dabbled with GWT (liked it…but it’s Java…and Java isn’t fun anymore), PHP (yeah, quick to get started, many web hosts support it…but it’s ugly and a pain to work with), haven’t tried Air/Flex/Flash yet (looks interesting but not fond of the proprietary roots), Ruby (love it, elegant language), and JavaScript/AJAX (not as much fun as Ruby but starting to like it). Personally, I think a mix of Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript is the way to go. I am having fun with them and the tooling is fairly decent. Plus, I also think that JavaScript + CSS3, HTML5, and SVG (and other graphic support) will soon be powerful enough to rival that of GWT+Gears and/or Air/Flex/Flash. That’s just speculation though. What do I know.

A couple of new concepts I hadn’t heard before though: SOFEA and SOUI. From a high level, it is a way of thinking about all these various web technologies/frameworks and mixing and matching them. If you were to architect your web application carefully using RESTful designs per se, you could run Rails with Flex on top, or GWT, or AJAX, etc. It’s got me thinking. Maybe it will gnaw at you too.

Tags: Colorado Springs Open Source Software Group

Colorado Springs Open Source Meetup (JCatapult)

Tonight’s open source meetup discussed the Apache Commons Project that included a logging demo (i.e. Commons Logging, Log4j, etc.). This talk was given by Gary Hessler.

The meeting ended with a talk by Brian Pontarelli who is the founder of Inversoft. Brian has been pretty much the sole developer behind JCatapult which is what his talk was about. JCatapult is a web application framework, written in Java, that is built upon a slew of other technologies such as:

• Struts 2
• Hibernate
• SiteMesh
• XWork
• JSP/JSTL
• FreeMarker
• Joda Time
• JPA
• Google Guice
• FCK
• ANT

Actually, I would go a step further to say that JCatapult is higher level web application framework that sits on top of Struts, Hibernate, etc. to give you more capabilties out of the box like generating scaffolding for forms, CRUD views, unit tests, simple components such as login and security, and database management (supports database migrations like what you would find in a Ruby on Rails setup).

Check it out, if you like. The demo was interesting but I’m quite happy sticking with Ruby on Rails for now.

Tags: Colorado Springs Open Source Software Group

Colorado Springs Open Source Software Group

Gary Hessler has just created an Open Source Software Group for the Colorado Springs area. I have never met Gary or know much about the group but have signed up as a member out of curiosity. If you live in the area, you might want to check this out as well. Here are the details of the first meeting:

• Date: Thursday, Feb 28, 2008.
• Time: 7:00 PM.
• Location: East Library Community Room at 5550 North Union Blvd.
• Meeting Topic: A general discussion of existing open source software in order to become more aware of what exists today.

See you there.

Tags: Colorado Springs Open Source Software Group