Hear hear. I happen to be involved on a project like this and ended up knee deep on the front end of things in JS hell. I don't remember the last time I wrote a line of Java code on this job. Makes me sad and stressed. I feel like some of the problems come from losing our way with the frameworks a little bit. There's no compiler or other such tools smacking us on the wrists when we do atrocious things and make life harder in the long run. It's too easy to make a mess and sometimes that's what you inherit.
I've been asking myself the same questions you are raising. I feel like there are some technologies that help. GWT comes to mind, if your team is at a point, where they can take advantage of it. I was also recently thinking about ways to integrate GWT into legacy front-end JS hell. I would like to get an opportunity to do this and I think, if successful, this would be something worth putting together a presentation about. Without GWT, there are things like the Chrome and Firefox 4, which go a long way toward helping the developer. But a lot of the time, it still feels like you're bashing your head against the wall. And it's not just JS. To be fair, one area that remains exposed to the developers to deal with, despite all the JS frameworks and tools, is CSS. Depending on how far back you have to support IE, it can really drive you nuts for days on end with no light at the end of the tunnel. Does not make for enjoyable works, to be sure. Alexey ________________________________ From: Ken Egervari <[email protected]> To: The Java Posse <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, April 8, 2011 8:44:08 PM Subject: [The Java Posse] Javascript assistance for java project This might not be the best place to post this, but I value the people that frequent this forum and I do work in the Java/Spring/Hibernate space. My apps that I'm working on are getting to be more and more javascript focused. This has brought on all kinds of pain and complexity from my point of view... but it's become necessary to be competitive and offer user experiences that are more modern and what people expect. I was wondering how you guys managed this complexity? What tools, frameworks, libraries, etc. do you think work the best with a Java/ Spring way of doing things. It seems that even beyond browser problems and the limitations of the language, maintaining the server/client contracts with ajax requests is a pain to test and refactor as the system evolves. The lack of dependency management in javascript is a pain, and RequireJS doesn't work 100% - sometimes it doesn't load the files and you have to refresh the page to fix it. There are all sorts of other problems. It's like javascript hell sometimes. I am starting to wonder if the pain is even worth the cost. I actually can't stand that development has gone this way. Programming just isn't fun anymore. There's so many tools and technologies. You think that with some things getting more rational and easier, other things end up blowing everything up. I mean, this whole polygot approach is driving me nuts. I can accomplish the same thing in a Swing application, but just because it needs to be "on the web", it makes the same application so much harder to deal with. Thoughts? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
