Hi, I’m Darryl Thompson and I want to welcome you to my personal and professional blog. I am an avid framework junkie so I spend a great deal of time researching new and emerging frameworks mainly for the Java and PHP programming languages. I also spend time studying Portal technology, and I think Liferay is a really fascinating portal. It has wide industry acceptance, is written in Java, and backed by a strong and active community.
Currently I am working as a Sr. Java developer for Recept PM, a pharmacy management company. We are a small company with ownership of 25 stores and back-office management responsibility for another half-dozen. Last year we posted $35 million in revenue so even though we are small we are very profitable.
On a personal note, I have been developing Java applications since 1999 and after about 13 months of PHP development I returned to full-time Java development using Spring MVC and a new framework called Play! although for personal development I use Wicket and most recently Vaadin. I can’t possibly say enough good things about Vaadin – check it out for yourself!
Play! reminds me of the very powerful and elegant Yii framework for PHP5 development. Specifically they share these common traits:
- Rapid deploy, test, development simply by “saving” your changes and refreshing your browser window!
- Easy publication – just create a Virtual Host entry in Apache2 and point to the application project directory, restart Apache2 and you are done (Named Virtual Hosts are just as simple to do).
- Debugging is a snap in either Eclipse or Netbeans
- Accessing Model layer data in the view is very simple using ActiveRecord (Yii) or JPA (Play!); both are very similar
- View layer syntax is nearly identical
However, Yii has a truly powerful code generation feature (gii) that Play! lacks at this time. You can have a fully functional app up and running on the Web (assuming a Database schema exists) in minutes, and if are you comfortable using Templates (Free HTML/CSS website templates for instance) you can leverage those into your Yii generated scaffolded code and vola a stunningly beautiful database-driven application in no time at all.
Each framework has good support and integration for jQuery so you can create applications that rival even Seam/JSF/RichFaces with just a little extra work.
Because of the Yii Framework I really have come to love PHP5 (Object-oriented of course) as much as Java, and when it comes website speed I think PHP5 wins hands down.
Well more on these two exciting frameworks in the coming days and months.
-Darryl