Having used Ruby and Ruby Rails on a couple recent projects for clients, I was very impressed with how quickly a 3 layer web app can put together. Add Javascript libraries like Ext, and a little Flash, and you have a powerful combination of ease of development, and an attractive, friendly user interface.

With a an existing, strong commitment to Java, you might find JRuby interesting if you haven’t already looked at it. While they are just recently getting a 1.0 version out the door, being able to leverage an existing Java infrastructure while using a quick delivery language and framework is very intriguing.

Having worked on a lot of Java projects over the years, I am excited about it.

Before we moved to Spring/Hibernate we attempted to use Apple’s Enterprise Objects framework for the object/database layer that’s integrated with the WebObjects UI – really neat in principle, but we ran into glitch after glitch – particularly performance issues on multiple servers and deadlocks and bottlenecks from a variety of sources; it just didn’t suit the pattern of use in our applications. And Apple seemed not interested in fixing even obvious problems. Probably too late now for even open-sourcing the code to do any good…

You ask whether Rod Johnson was in one form or another the inspiration behind our stack. While I haven’t read any of Rod’s books or articles, we certainly use Spring extensively in our stack and we believe in a “light-weight” approach to development, where “light-weight” to us means keeping the domain model free of infrastructure-related encumbrances as much as possible, relying on a container to provide infrastructure services (and other “cross-cutting” concerns) via injection to the objects (rather than obnoxious and unwieldy static-time relationships).

We’re very familiar with Lucene, though I’m not sure if we have actually used it in any of our projects. It’s a very cool product.

Thanks for the kind words, and best wishes to you.

your use of java looks pretty similar to what we settled on after about 8 years of trying different things – the one major difference is the user interface layer, where we’re using Apple’s WebObjects frameworks; mainly because that was one of our intermediate phases where we wrote a lot of user-interface stuff we don’t want to rewrite just now… The easymock/junit piece helps us try to achieve test-first development, though we still haven’t quite figured out how to do that at the user interface level. We also use ‘dbunit’ for database integration tests, allowing us to ensure functionality at a somewhat higher level than the usual unit tests.

I’m wondering if some of your current design was at all guided by Rod Johnson’s approach – he’s behind Spring itself, but in particular we found his book “Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB” to be an excellent guide for this sort of design.

One other piece – we’re using ‘lucene’ as a search engine, which allows very customized development and linking to our database.

Anyway, your java stack sounds like exactly the right approach to me!

Second question: What are the specific pain points you’re experiencing? Integrating a report with a JSF-generated page? I’m not up to speed on the latest with Crystal and JSF integration, but that will always be harder than redirecting to a Crystal-generated page or artifact, of course. I’d suggest you push for the latter.

We use Maven 2.0.4 with CruiseControl. We have also purchased 30+ build boxes that are imaged to the same Linux/WebSpere/CruiseControl/Maven configuration. Teams have total control over these boxes and can use them as a sandbox to make changes and test before moving through the various environments. Once a team has worked the kinks out they can then submit a formal request to have the configurations changed in their respective environments.

This has been a pretty good approach for us because a team isn’t stuck waiting for an admin to make changes on their box or if they simply need to restart something they can do it themselves. The way the images are constructed we can also upgrade various pieces of an env and have little downtime.

Our maven configuration has actually become very efficient the last couple of months. We setup maven-proxy to download resources not it our library and can throttle what gets added automatically to our local-centralized maven repo. All in all it has been a very productive configuration for us.

BTW, we have also created a handful of custom maven goals for our projects for things like database ddl zipping and versions. Each CruiseControl build that successfully completes gets its own build number and is mvn site:deploy to a repo where QA can pick it up and use it for testing. All of the maven builds also send their status to a Dashboard Widget that we have created to show the status of each project. We have also setup lava lamps for the status of the build similar to what you can find in the Pragmatic Project Automation book.

Davies – Please see the post on tech talks. Thanks.