Next, they went on showing us the Ruby On Rails (ROR) and Grails frameworks and of course demonstrated the fast creation of a simple working web-application (those famous 10 minute demos). If you want to know more about it, just follow the links, read the introduction and watch the screencasts.

Both Grails and Rails (when used with JRuby) allow integration with Java and a Java infrastructure. Charles for example used the rome library in Rails to generate an RSS feed and the next version of the GlassFish application server will offer special support for deployment of Rails applications. So the idea is, why not combine the best of both worlds (Grails & Java or Rails & Java).

As Groovy is a dynamic language written for the JVM and shares a lot of similarities with Java, I think it might be more suitable for Java teams and environments than Ruby. Grails itself is based on solid java components like Spring, hibernate, quartz, sitemesh, embedded jetty and hsqldb (80% of grails is written in Java) and offers various java related plugins (e.g. for DWR, Wicket, xFire,…). The 0.6 release of Grails (available as release candidate) will offer integrated support for Spring Webflow and the 1.0 release is due in October.

All in all it has been an inspiring afternoon and no matter if you favor Ruby, Grooy, Grails or Rails, these are exiting developments and if you can, learn something new and give it a try. I started to learn Ruby & ROR a while ago but never really had a chance to use it practically. With Groovy & Grails I think it might be different as the demand for lean and agile java development is growing.

More photos on Flickr

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For quite a while, I was trying to ignore the increasing buzz about Wicket, convincing myself that I don’t need yet another MVC framework (there are too many of them anyway), but somewhere between the Javalobby articles, the InfoQ article and the O’ReillyNet article – my resolve cracked and I took a closer look. (…)

It looked interesting and so I decided to try and migrate a selected few JSP screens of an existing Spring MVC + Spring WebFlow application to Wicket. This went much better than I expected and two months later (not full time) – I completed migrating the entire app to Wicket and it is now ready for a new release as a 100% JSP free application. (…)

So is Wicket the one true MVC framework that a lot of us have been hunting for? At the moment, I tend to think so. (…)

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It all sounds so familiar. Spring MVC, Spring WebFlow, XML configuration files, JSP with various tag libraries and custom tags, JSTL, Acegi, an unmaintainable collection of Javascript files and libraries, SiteMesh decorators, Velocity, web-designers who mess up JSP files and so on. Web development like this is error prune and not really suitable for an agile development process.

Wicket sounds very interesting and promising. I should give it a try but I guess I can not convince management to give us some extra weeks to convert the web-application we’ve been working on from Spring MVC to Wicket.

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