Back in action...

I've been wrapped up with all sorts of business lately after I left RedHat. Since then I've been spending a lot more time looking at building up development platforms for the web for projects that I have coming up in 2008. Anyone who knows me knows that I like platforms and want to merge good technologies together to come up with rapid results that are easily scalable. After spending a lot of time researching technologies I began looking at Grails and Flex as a viable one::two combination for getting projects done quickly. Grails, of course, takes much of the pain and suffering out of building controller based designs similar to the paradigms surrounding Rails.

The main benefit of Grails being that I can leverage all of the domain knowledge and experience I have with Java to build cool things that can be easily scaled using commodity application servers like Glassfish and JBoss. Flex has proven itself worthy for web-based user interface development. One can build great interfaces in no time. Many people choose to fight the trend to Flex, some even choose to look at Silverlight which has a much worse content development path as well. Adobe has clear user interface tools which allow artists and developers to work closely together to build their solutions.

Accordingly by using Grails with Flex one can building in mere hours fairly sophisticated applications that would take significantly longer if one were depending on writing it even the best Javascript APIs. The only possible downside, for me, is that these Flash based interfaces won't work on a mobile platform - but to be honest if you're building a mobile application you really should build a MOBILE application and not depend on your web site to be your application.

I can hear people saying "well you can get great stuff on the iPhone using web based technologies" and indeed you can, but if you want to build COMPELLING applications you end up having to write native code that talks to the underlying platform and at that point all the nice HTML/CSS/Javascript fun ends and you have to do some serious in-the-trenches development.

Blogged with Flock