These comments made sense. The open-source community does spend relatively little of its resources on the tedious make-it-easy issues. (With Firefox being a good counter-example... how did that project manage it?)
> If somebody would marry the easy-stuff-is-easy part of .NET with the > hard-stuff-is-possible part of hibernate/java/tapestry.... A great example of this was the old WebObjects Direct-To-Web framework. You could throw together a quick CRUD app in no time... point the tool at your model and hit a button. It took me less than a minute to get a running app the first time I tried it (four years ago). You could revise the pages inside the wizard-ish GUI builder tool, but when you were ready to make more serious modifications you could tell it to generate the source code. (I think they called it "freezing" the app.) It would give you a fully functional app built on the normal frameworks and you could do whatever you want (except go back into the wizard-ish GUI builder tool). Here's a description I found with a quick google. http://developer.apple.com/documentation/LegacyTechnologies/WebObjects/WebObjects_5.1/DirectToWeb/WalkThrough/Generating_Components.html "WebAssistant" is what they call the wizard-ish GUI builder now. A WebAssistant on top of Tapestry would be awesome. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Casey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Tapestry users'" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2005 3:02 AM Subject: RE: Tapestry's Simplicity Blues > <snip> > > Thing is that I never worked with JSF or APS.NET to judge Tapestry with > > other component web frameworks. From what I've read around, I sincerely > > doubt that JSF is simplier, but I would really like some expeienced > > ASP.NET > > developer to say his opinion. > > I wouldn't necessarily call myself a .NET expert, but I did prototype a > system in in a few months ago (I decided not to go down that road so I'm > back in java). The short version of my experience. > > .NET does make the simple stuff simple. If you want to build a quick and > dirty CRUD app with only a few forms, .NET is way faster than anything I've > yet found in the java world. Between the WYSIWIG form editor, the component > library, and the magic "don't worry about it, it just works" persistence > strategy they have, it's really easy to do easy stuff. > > But, and here's where .NET and I parted ways, it doesn't have a lot of > features to make the *hard* stuff simple. Want an abstract object > persistence layer like Hibernate? So sorry, roll your own, or use a thin > resultset wrapper like ADO. Want to use lots of generic forms and runtime > data binding? Sorry, it's a design time framework. Sure you *can* bind at > runtime, but if you do you can't use any of the cool features that made the > easy stuff easy. > > All in all, I felt like it was something of a trap for serious development > work. It makes banging together a sketchy prototype really easy, but then > you end up not being able to use any of those easy features on the real > project. > > If somebody would marry the easy-stuff-is-easy part of .NET with the > hard-stuff-is-possible part of hibernate/java/tapestry, I'd switch to it in > a heartbeat. To date though, nobody has pulled it off. If I were a gambling > man, I'd bet on the Eclipse group making a decent go at it in the next > couple of years. > > I'm not all that confident though that the current stable of open source > projects out there (choose your poison) are going to get there though. In my > experience they're usually written by developers who got fed up with crap > like .NET and decided to tackle the interesting "hard stuff" problems > instead of the tedious "easy stuff" issues. So we have at least a half dozen > web application frameworks out there, but nobody has yet written a decent > WYSYWIG gui for any of them (if I'm wrong here I'm 100% certain I'll get 20 > emails about it :). > > In any event, the short version is Tapestry/Hibernate/Java is way more > *powerful* than .NET for the kind of work I do. It's not, however, easier. > > --- Pat > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
