It seems that they are springing up everywhere - no way can I evaluate all of them - or to be honest even a selection. I am reasonably
java savvy, but most of my knowledge is with client side Swing development. I have an open source project on the web called Commander4j. I have coded my application so that it can connect to and use mySQL, MSSQL and Oracle versions of my database. The core application consists of a single .jar file and this jar is used by the desktop swing application, a server side "service" using the excellent wrapper from Tanuki Software. I've event got a
servlet using the same file so that I know my logic remains consistent throughout the application. It is possible for several web users to connect to the same servlet, each of them can connect to a different host database (any of the above types) and see the web page in their preferred language. Although I am pleased with this, my biggest headache is
thread safety on the Servlet side of things. I would like to consider moving away from my hand crafted code, but I wonder if I have already painted myself into a corner. All my database transactions for example have a class which expects them to be constructed with 2 parameters, a Host ID which is used to determine the database to use, and a Session ID which is used to ensure that in the Servlet at least I don't get any problems with different users/transactions sharing the same connection to the database.
Phew - lots and lots of work.
I kinda like GWT as it seems easy to work with the GWT Designer Tool - however the main use of the web pages is on mobile devices which have a real mixed bag of Javascript/browser versions.
I had a look at the getting started sections on a number of frameworks like Tapestry for example but have to admit that I found the
Maven stuff all rather tedious and confusing.
So I would like a framework which I can get to grips with - without the need to learn 15 other technologies 1st.
I would like to work with Eclipse and have some graphical design tools. My preferred server is
Tomcat,
It would be nice to be up-to-date and have a couple of reasonable books I can get from Amazon.
All my source is available from sourcforge via
http://www.commander4j.com - the b4web.zip would probably give you insight into my current level of ability.
Any advice would be really appreciated.
Thanks
Dave