Also consider the "Hit by a bus" factor. We recently had this issue come up at my company, although it was a metaphorical bus. Do not expect the people designing your app now to be around in the future or even 6 months from now. So pick something that is maintainable and can be picked up by a junior to mid-level programmer.
If you want something that is more heavily client side (lots of JS) and handles browser quirks and localization well, GWT is also an option. For reports and exporting, I've had great success with DynamicJasper (JasperReports+a layer of simplifying sugar) and T5. The DynamicJasper demo uses GWT. Also, are you serious about using C? As in the language C, with no garbage collector? I think that's one too many hurdles, even for a pro-level team. Why use a web framework? They exist because they solve the hard problems. This is the same reason you'd use standard libraries--no sensible person wants to write things from scratch. In fact, I would argue that higher level frameworks (like web frameworks and ORMs) are OOP on a library level. If you're developers don't respect the benefits of OOP, this project will only end in pain and suffering. If they have evolved to something beyond OOP, you wouldn't have mentioned C. It sounds like your developers grew up programming machine language. On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 12:28 PM, devilabit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > 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] > >
