Another Blog About the Smackdown
In my quest for more feedback on the Web Framework Smackdown, I’ve found this blog entry. I don’t agree with the author that it was too nice. In my opinion the idea was to convince people to leave the current MVC or JSP/servlet paradigm behind and create stateful, rich web applications using the component based frameworks of today. And they succeeded more or less.
Having each speaker jack hammering the other’s brains out with statements like ‘Mine is smaller than yours’ (lines of code, that is), or in the case of JSF ‘Mine is bigger than yours’ (XML files) wouldn’t have helped the discussion.
The general sentiment of the panel was: move to component based development or be left behind. Like David Geary said:
“Struts is old school, get over it”
July 2nd, 2005 at 3:52 am
I was at the Web Framework Smackdown and thought I’d give you my impressions.
First, I wish this session had come earlier in the conference as I found myself wishing I could go back in time and see some of the specific framwework presentations.
Second, while I agree that the consensus of the panel was to move away from Struts, the audience didn’t seem convinced of that. Questioner after questioner seemed to be begging for someone to tell them why they should migrate away from Struts, but no one explicitly did so.
Third, like you I couldn’t be happier that the Smackdown was nothing like the portal vendor experts panel.
Finally, I came away without sensing a clear winner of the Smackdown. It seemed pretty clear that Webworks came out on the bottom (although I wonder if the majority of the audience feels that way; there really was a sizable contingent who seemed interested in finding the framework that was most like Struts), but I couldn’t put my finger on the winner. Wicket and JSF probably came out on top, but I could be wrong.
July 2nd, 2005 at 4:29 am
Thanks for your comments. The presentations will be available pretty soon I think through Sun. In the mean time, I think you will be helped more by looking at the Wicket examples and the Wicket Introduction.
July 2nd, 2005 at 7:07 am
Hi Martjin. I thought the session was pretty useful and brought out some key points. But I was hoping for a little more verbal abuse, it was supposed to be a smack-down after all. I think Jason scored the most zingers (i.e. “a witty, often caustic remark”). Maybe participants should be required to drink 3 irish car bombs at the start.
July 2nd, 2005 at 10:20 am
But you do know that car bombs are for sissies?
July 2nd, 2005 at 4:03 pm
That’s the spirit!