Building a custom J2EE framework vs adopting an existing one
In the company I work for, we developed a custom framework for J2EE applications some years ago, when struts was the only serious candidate one in this world and it didn’t gave us all the functionality we needed. The main purpose of that custom-framework is to give an homogeneous architecture and development way for all the applications built by many external companies for us. Now, these times have changed and we think it’s time to re-think about that decision and the viability to keep on inverting time (and money) incorporating new features to it: AJAX support, EJB3, WS* support, new development utilities and so on.
The main pro of keeping our proprietary framework is taking the full control of the architecture and funcionalities provided: if you make something you can do anything you want. On the other hand, technology has evolved a lot on these years. There are many open source frameworks (Spring, Struts2, JBoss Seam, Tapestry, Wicket, Grails) with tons of capabilities built-in already. For these cases, only some development for specific components such our customized security system and that’s all. And these frameworks evolve themselves!!! I could write a long list of pro’s for adopting a standard .
On the other hand, I find it very difficult to make the correct bet for our “base-framework”. It was easier when Struts was “the one and only”, believe me.
I guess there is no silver bullet. I think it depends of the nature of the application to be built. It cannot be the same functionality required to make a complex application that must invoke WebServices exposed on a ESB following some conventions and standards compared to a simple CRUD app. In this case, you can think in a modular framework “choose-what-you-need” or even in different technologies and frameworks to support different needs.
What a hard job, don’t you think so?
Any comment will be appreciated.
Actually, I would choose Wicket for both of those applications (but then I MAY be biased
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Jonathan Locke
9 January 2009 at 2:24 pm
Hi Jonathan,
First of all, it’s a honor for me you to post some comments on my blog. Thank you very much.
Regarding to Wicket, I find very interesting the simplicity for development provided by the framework.
In our enterprise, normally we don’t make any programming. All the programming stuff is outsourced and the infrastructure we need is something in order to have configuration data, general information, statistics and so on. The developer point of view is very interesting (here is where Wicket could fit perfectly) but not the most important thing for us.
Do you have any idea about how Wicket (or any other framework) could provide any of these? By the way, do you have any screencast or video about how to make any application with Wicket?
Regards.
Juanjo
12 January 2009 at 10:41 am