Software Architecture and Content Management

If you need to start a new web application today - what would you base it on?

Will the client experience be managed by Pure HTML or RIA ( Yahoo UI or GWT or DOJO toolkit or ATF  or  OpenLaszlo or Flash or Swing…)

Will the web tier use MVC (Struts  2.0 or 1.3 Or Spring MVC) Or Tapestry or JSF ( MYFaces , Seam ) ….

What about templating and mashups? Tiles / Velocity / Framemarker / portal servers ….

How to address security and state management for Ajax UI? will you use a BPM engine?

And on the app layer? Pojo, AOP (Spring ..), EJB, ….

Which JDK 1.4/5/6( half the world is on 1.4)?

Java technology has never been as fragmented as it is now. There is no centre of gravity with Sun no longer being a dominant player.

This is making life extremely difficult for enterprises and architects - as you need to bet on a technology while creating enterprise applications which are supposed to last a few years.

We ( MindTree as Software development and consulting organization ) - are increasingly finding customers requesting our help to define a technology stack and if possible a framework. Neel who heads the Framework group at MindTree has an innovative solution in the form of a Meta Framework.

His team has created thin wrappers for various layers of frameworks which make accessing one layer from the other layer uniform ( regardless of whether its  Spring or an EJB behind the scene, and regardless of whether its struts or Spring MVC calling the business logic).

This approach makes it possible to swap in and out different layers without impacting the other layers.  This way he has been able to limit the problem in half (assuming only one layer will go desperately out of fasion at a time). Also the developers dont need to re-learn a lot if a new framework component is introduced.

He also spends time in tracking the list of mature options at each layer and has opinion on which technologies you can bet on . As always best option depends on requirements and what the customer organization has already invested in. Organizations may end up having hybrids - based on demands of individual options.

I faced with the above dilemma for a development I am going to jump into approached him and walked back with a stack of

(YUI And/OR OpenLaszlo ) => (Struts 2 OR Spring MVC) => Spring

though I am still not convinced on why not Seam.