Hi Alice,
In my (biased) opinion you've narrowed down your choices to the best
tools available in the Java world. Whichever way you go you will end up
with a stable well designed tool that gets the job done.
Note that both Cayenne and Tapestry have strong EOF/WO influence, so
there are lots of architectural similarities. I few things to consider
when making a choice are:
1. WO is more mature than any comparable Java technology
2. Apple's GUI productivity tools are more polished than the OpenSource
alternatives (aside from WOLips that has the power of Eclipse platform
behind it), but the gap is narrowing (E.g. I can't say that
CayenneModeler is all that behind EOModeler).
3. On the other hand, if you are not on Mac OS X, WO tools quality
constantly goes down due to the (understandable) lack of interest from
Apple to support Windows (and those tools never existed on Linux).
There are rumors that there is a good chance of loosing WOBuilder and
EOModeler altogether:
http://objectstyle.org/woproject/lists/woproject-dev/2003/11/0000.html
4. WO has Direct-to-Web (DTW) and Direct-to-Java Client technologies
that allow fast rule based programming. On a side note Cayenne soon
adds Swing view integration support called "Data Views":
http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/lists/cayenne-devel/2003/10/0042.html
and
http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/lists/cayenne-devel/2003/10/0033.html
Should make it a snap creating the apps with rich Swing UI.
5. PHB issue. I guess Open Source has more leverage in the corporate
world these days, while Apple is still perceived as somewhat of a
consumer technology provider (looking at Xserve prices I am surprised
anyone is buying those things at all.. it is one thing to have a cool
PowerBook with Mac OS X on your desk, but putting an overpriced piece
of iron on the rack in the closet is totally different). All the Java
companies I've known in the past 2 years (including banks, telcos,
etc.) use Open Source software in some form (this is very different
from say year 2000). So the PHBs in those companies are sometimes even
forced to come up with the "Open Source strategy" for their company,
and other funny stuff.
6. Don't underestimate Open Source benefits for you as a user. The
ability to modify and fix the source code is your weapon needed for
survival. If you look at Cayenne mailing list archives for the past few
months, patches for the critical bugs discovered by the users where
released within a day! Same is true if you need new features that a
product X does not support.
... But like I've said, you are safe making your choice out of two
great options ;-)
Cheers,
Andrus
On Nov 2, 2003, at 12:26 PM, Alice Oaks wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm evaluating technology choices for a database-backed web project.
> None of us has ever worked in Java before, so I'm slowly making my way
> through the alphabet soup, trying to understand all the pieces we will
> need and what they do. Yes, we're a bit nuts, but that's ok. I prefer
> to think of it as brave. :)
>
> I have tentatively narrowed our choices to WebObjects or
> Eclipse/Tapestry/Cayenne. I have read about both, but not to a level
> of detail that I would call informed yet. For example, I'm pretty
> sure that the WO API is more extensive, but I haven't actually
> compared to see if that is true.
>
> Since there is a huge amount of material to digest here, I'm starting
> to talk to people about this now, even though I don't quite know what
> I'm doing yet, because if there are compelling reasons to go one way
> or the other I can save myself a lot of time. I'm asking on this list
> (one of about 10 I've been reading lately) because it seems like there
> is a good mix of people here who use both tools. If this is not an
> appropriate topic, then please just send me to the right place
> (politely, I hope :).
>
> My criteria are pretty simple: I'm looking for something that is
> relatively straightforward to use, is well thought of in Java circles,
> and has a future. I don't expect the tools we choose to make learning
> Java or J2EE any easier, but since we have a lot to learn I don't want
> the tools to make it harder, either. I'm also looking for something
> that's going to be acceptable to the average IT manager (aka PHB). It
> is less important to me that WO is not Open Source, but I would like
> the ability to pull in other people's code (JARs, I believe?) and
> integrate it with ours where appropriate (the end result of this will
> be Open Source).
>
> Thoughts, suggestions? Have I overlooked other tools I should
> investigate?
>
> thanks,
>
> Alice
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