I just put up a new release of Adroit, changes are described at the link. I’ve been using this framework for awhile now on my wife’s website, sayitonthewall.com, and am currently using it to develop an eCommerce site for pujbaby.com (not live yet, thats their previous site). It’s been working out great, providing me a very fast development platform, and very flexible as well. In both of these sites I’m using a lot of ajax functionality to give the stores a streamlined experience. Adroit has worked great for this in helping me keep everything organized.
The other night I was working on something that required adding some new attributes to a dom, a few new pages, and some functionality based on that new data. It was extremely easy and quick to add this due to the framework (Adroit), and the dynamic language (PHP). I find this rapid development using PHP compared to the time it takes to do something in the Java environment I spend my work days in on completely different ends of the scale.
Oddly enough, I find it refreshing and almost therapeutic after a long day working in Struts, Spring, Hibernate, and Tomcat, coming home and spending some free time developing within the loose boundaries set forth by PHP. I may be one of the only people that enjoy going home after work, to work some more in a different setting, but I do. While I enjoy developing so quickly in PHP, I can’t imagine trying to work on a large project that involves a huge domain with variants for different customers, and a team of developers all working together. The strong typing and refactor capabilities you get from Java are huge there. Currently we use Java from front to back on a web application for court systems, and I think its great for many things. I don’t particularly enjoy working with Java for a front end to a web app though, I think using a dynamic language like PHP, Ruby, or Python would be great for a front end, and then relying on Java to do the heavy lifting in the back end. I can’t help but wonder if there are many others out there in similar situations that share any of my same feelings, or have opinions on this topic.
