Only a Few Minutes
After explaining my reservations about the OpenLaszlo platform to our summer interns, and the feasibility of having our front-end render in HTML (rather than Flash) within a matter of weeks, not months, we made an immediate switch yesterday to another View component of our MVC framework. [John Sundman seems to have found my post, and offers up some insight here.]We've looked at Rails in the past, and I think it's a nice framework (it certainly has a lot of people excited over the possibilities), but I'm not sure how quickly we can decouple the Rails View from the Model and Controller (MVC pattern). As such, we'd likely end up writing a lot of the code by hand, kind of defeating the whole point of Rails. Instead, we moved toward PHP.
PHP certainly has a lot going for it as a framework and language, and it's been around for quite a while. We mostly focus on Java in-house, but the necessity for a quick, easy-to-learn framework which can be prototyped fast has left Java in the dust. Before the end of the day was up, we had PHP installed and running on the necessary machines, and then had downloaded and installed the other necessary components.
Our interns were able to research a few of the PHP frameworks (which can be easily decoupled from the back-end), and settled on Smarty as a template framework, and Zephyr as an AJAX framework. Both projects appear somewhat stable, and we'll also be throwing in Prototype.JS and hand-coding where necessary.
Our only kink is going to be the (perhaps major issue) combination of the View with the Model and Controller. Our back-end functionality uses the Acegi Security layer to integrate with Spring. In theory, this is a back-end only security library ... but we're well aware that Acegi can also set cookies, etc... to validate users. There could be some interesting integration issues between the two layers.
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