Sunday, August 7, 2011

Different languages for the JVM

A few weeks ago I started learning Groovy and Grails. Even though I'm quite proficient with Java and the Spring Framework for building web pages, I wanted to know if Grails would lead me to an even faster way.

I downloaded a few examples and I have to say that I like the convention over configuration scheme of Grails, but was not so comfortable with Groovy's approach. I also tried Griffon as the supposed project had a client-server architecture and because of the requirements I wasn't sure if a web-based client was enough so I wanted to try a desktop alternative.

Griffon follows Grails conventions but seems less mature. Also, I found IntelliJ to be the best IDE (tried also STS and Netbeans) for Groovy apps.

In the meantime, the main subject for the Java User Group meeting that was coming was Scala. I'm lucky to have the, according to reviews, great book Programming in Scala, and will be starting reading it soon. I heard that having Scala it makes little sense to learn Groovy, so maybe a better use of my time will be to learn Scala and the Play Framework.

As a matter of fact, I was supposed to play with Scala today, but my procrastination lend me to install JRuby and Jython, and ended playing with the last one, after I learned that the popular Django framework was made in Python.

So I made a test web site following a Django-Jython tutorial, but it seems that there is little connection with the rest of the Java world. My goal was to convert the site to a web archive (.war), deploy it in JBoss, and connect Django with the JMS and the transaction manager. I don't know, maybe it's supposed to be used standalone.

I think I'll go back to Scala now.

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