I worked briefly with a project that used GWT (we of course ultimately rewrote the whole thing in pylons) for some portions of a web based administration tool. The components were incredibly simple table controls displaying database data. There were two dozen GWT-derived source files used to generate about four different data views that all looked nearly alike, multiple compilers and two separate build.xml files existed to compile the full application (gwt has its own compiler separate from javac), and there were skeletons, stubs and all kinds of translation/glue code all over the place. On the view side there was nothing about these components that you wouldn't have seen from a perl CGI script 10 years ago - they were just flat tables of data, no interactivity beyond "previous page/next page". The usage of GWT was obviously selected out of a vague sense of "doing things the 'right' way" without the benefit of actual experience in doing things at all.
These small table controls took more than a full second to render just 20 or 30 rows of data, and I assumed that the underlying SQL and database was the reason. Not so at all. Removing the usage of GWT and replacing with a simple ajax call to a struts action which rendered inline HTML directly from a jsp page, with all other factors remaining in place including the same database code and database (remember we're still in java), the components rendered about 50 times faster. The size of the code base shrunk by about 24 source files, one less build.xml file, and several hundred class files (their build process was multiplying the full set of GWT classes in multiple locations for some reason, which I suspect was not a GWT-specific issue). To see why a straight ajax call to a JSP page to a struts action to some hibernate code might be 50x faster than a GWT interface to a GWT- enabled servlet to the same hibernate code, the next time you build a small GWT application, use firebug to look at the XMLHttpRequest calls being sent over the wire. The messages are more bloated than Google's stock price two years ago and more inscrutable than Peter Norvig's PHD dissertation. Remember, the "enterprise" way of thinking is what's brought us the economic disaster, vast ponzi schemes where everyone looks the other way, etc. I.e. "seems to work for now so fuck it". On Jan 30, 4:04 am, Tycon <[email protected]> wrote: > I heard that many "enterprise" web applications use tomcat (and Google > Web Toolkit to create the client side javascript code). > What are the advantages of using a framework like Pylons (or Django, > Rails, etc) compared to using Java framworks ? > Why can't the Java framwork be used for non-enterpise web site apps ? > > Java has a performance advantage over Python (and Ruby), but I guess > the down side is that it's not as "agile" for rapid development ? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" 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/pylons-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
