Spring MVC, Web Work, Cocoon, Tapestry et al provide us with great frameworks to build our web applications on, but are these frameworks the way forward or are they the last remnants of the old republic?
In a recent post to the Cocoon mailing list Stefano Mazzocchi (the father of Cocoon) asks if changes in client side technology are making these advanced web frameworks less relevant.
… and the more I learn how to driven the client, the less I feel the need for advanced server frameworks. Is it just me?
Stefano is right, things are changing, the web is becoming a true application platform (just take a look at how many patents google has taken out in this area over the last 12 months) and the current crop of frameworks are going to either change to meet our needs or fade into obscurity. It’s not just the frameworks but also the infrastructure on which they are built. As Greg Wilkins points out in his entry on continuations in Jetty 6
The advent of AJAX as a web application model is significantly changing the traffic profile seen on the server side. Because AJAX servers cannot deliver asynchronous events to the client, the AJAX client must poll for events on the server. To avoid a busy polling loop, AJAX servers will often hold onto a poll request until either there is an event or a timeout occurs.
The Servlet specification with its focus on simple request/response interactions will need to change to support asynchronous event based modes of interaction. The current crop of servlet containers use a thread per active connection which has worked in our simple request/response world may not be practical in an AJAX environment. NIO and it’s event based networking will be the key but the current servlet specification was written well before NIO and has no real support for event based processing of requests. HTTP itself isn’t all that AJAX friendly but with the web browser being the likely application client for the foreseeable future and the slow moving w3c we are going to have to live with it.
There is space to make a mark. To take a mental shift. To be apart of the evolution. It’s an exciting period to have some free time to investigate emerging technologies.