Grails + ExtJs
Looking at the beginnings of a new webapp. I’m heavily leaning towards Grails+ExtJs, even though the ExtJs plugin has been discontinued because of the license change. Honestly, paying for developer licenses is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. For widgets, dojo seems to be a runner-up, however it just doesn’t feel as polished, and I find the experience somewhat lacking. I wish jquery had a more mature & official widget set, because it would be my first choice.
In my previous project, we used JSF 1.2 + RichFaces. While I feel that combination can produce good results, it didn’t feel very agile. On a new JSF project going forward, I would recommend Seam; however it is not worth the effort to retrofit a large project.
James Lorenzen has a post about how to roll your own ExtJs plugin for grails, which I will probably give a shot.
With JSF, we were pushing markup down to the browser using ajax polling & rerendering of components. However, I want to start using RESTful services along with Comet. This should get interesting…
I think those are excellent points.
If I were creating a new app I would probably definitely start with extjs and grails. Speaking from experience my team has rewritten 2 jsf (icefaces) applications into extjs and it’s been a great switch.
I think tomcat 6 and geronimo, and maybe glassfish have comet support out of the box.
Keep us up to date.
James Lorenzen
August 28, 2008 at 2:07 pm
we have a commercial app in beta using extjs+grails – worked out well
Arun Rao
August 28, 2008 at 9:28 pm