I apologize in advance if this is a little off topic.
I recently started work for a new company and they are looking at moving some of their desktop apps to web apps. I have been tasked with investigating how we would go about this. The web app in question will need a rich interface but I would not consider it a Rich Internet Application. Without going into too much detail this app will be used to search a large archive and display the results. A user can drill down into these results and apply filters client side. Additionally it will be necessary to save searches, tag, rate, comment on results and export to PDF/word etc. The look and feel will be familiar to something like outlook web access. Now this to me sounds like a normal web app with some extra bits of JavaScript to make it feel like a desktop app. Thats why I started to consider Tapestry5. We could build our own custom widgets and reuse would be easy. However the architecture that the developers here have in mind is to write everything client side in javascript and html and use our own custom web server to serve the application. Communication is JSON over http. The idea is to write our own custom modules for the web server to handle things like saving searches, tagging, templates, ajax. This architecture doesnt even consider the concept of a web application, its built more around the idea of a an ajax request going to the ajax module as an example. It like a "C" design a web app. Even the document structure will require us to have a separate version for each localized html page instead of having one master version and a properties file. For now they have a couple of simple web apps using this design. However I feel that for feature rich web applications with a lot of functionality we will need to write many custom modules(things that come for free in tapestry like template's, components, client/server side validation) and it will be a nightmare to develop and maintain. Eventually after a long difficult struggle we will end up having written our own web framework written in C with little library support(no tool support) that is not as good as a mature framework thats taken a web framework expert 2 and half years to write. Productivity will be low, the company will have to hire many more people and these will be expensive because they will have to be C and JavaScript gurus! I dont think the people here really understand the concept of a web application and how much work it takes to develop one. Its difficult to change peoples ideas when your new and have yet to earn your colleagues respect so thats why I need your help. My question is how do I sell them the idea of using a web framework? Any comments, suggestions, arguments, links, advantages/disadvantages to using web frameworks etc would be very welcome. Thanks. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Why-would-you-use-a-web-framework--tp20343460p20343460.html Sent from the Tapestry - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
