Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I've just started learning Scala, and the first thing I'm going to implement is a tiny web application. I've been using Erlang for the last year to implement server-side software, but I've never wrote web applications before. It will be a great experience.
Are there web-frameworks for Scala except for Lift?
Don't get me wrong, Lift looks awesome. I just want to know how many frameworks there are so that I can then choose between them. It's always a good to have a choice, but I the only thing I found was Lift.
I'm very interested in Scala, but I have not used it yet, so with that caveat, the frameworks I am aware of that are not mentioned in HRJ's answer (Lift, Sweet, Slinky) are:
Scalatra, previously Step (on GitHub)
Play 2 (on GitHub)
Pinky
I wrote a blog post about this.
To summarise, some of the options are:
Lift
Sweet
Slinky
I finally found that none were suitable for me, and developed my own little "framework". (It is not open-source yet).
I like Lift ;-)
Play is my second choice for Scala-friendly web frameworks.
Wicket is my third choice.
Following is a dump of frameworks. It doesn't mean I actually used them:
Coeus. A traditional MVC web framework for Scala.
Unfiltered. A toolkit for servicing HTTP requests in Scala.
Uniscala Granite.
Gardel
Mondo
Amore. A Scala port of the Ruby web framework Sinatra
Scales XML. Flexible approach to XML handling and a simplified way of interacting with XML.
Belt. A Rack-like interface for web applications built on top of Scalaz-HTTP
Frank. Web application DSL built on top of Scalaz/Belt
MixedBits. A framework for the Scala progamming language to help build web sites
Circumflex. Unites several self-contained open source projects for application development using the Scala programming language.
Scala Webmachine. Port of Basho's webmachine in Scala, a REST-based system for building web applications
Bowler. A RESTful, multi-channel ready Scala web framework
Try Play Framework, which also support Scala.
One very interesting web framework with commercial deployment is Scalatra, inspired by Ruby's Sinatra. Here's an InfoQ article about it.
I find Unfiltered very interesting https://github.com/unfiltered/unfiltered.
It's mentioned in IttayD's list.
Here is a presentation about it http://unfiltered.lessis.me/#0
and the video http://code.technically.us/post/942531598/doug-tangren-presents-the-unfiltered-toolkit-for
Also here there is an article with more info http://code.technically.us/post/998251172/holding-the-parameter
It must be noted that there is also a considerable interest in Wicket and Scala. Wicket fits Scala suprisingly well. If you want to take advantage of the very mature Wicket project and its ecosystem (extensions) plus the concise syntax and productivity advantage of Scala, this one may be for you!
See also:
Some prosa
Presentation
Some experience with Wicket and Scala
Announcments with reference to the project for the glue code to bind Scala closures to models
Play is pretty sweet.
It is now production ready. It incorporates: a cool template framework,automatic reloading of source files upon safe, a composable action system, akka awesomeness, etc.
Its part of the Typesafe Stack.
Having used it for two projects, I can say that it works pretty smoothly and it should be something to consider next time you are looking to learn new web frameworks.
I tend to use JAX-RS using Jersey (you can write nice resource beans in Scala, Java or Groovy) to write RESTul web applications. Then I use Scalate for the rendering the views using one of the various template languages (JADE, Scaml, Ssp (Scala Server Pages), Mustache, etc.).
There's a new web framework, called Scala Web Pages. From the site:
Target Audience
The Scala Pages web framework is likely to appeal to web programmers who come from a Java background and want to program web applications in Scala. The emphasis is on OOP rather than functional programming.
Characteristics And Features
Adheres to model-view-controller paradigm
Text-based template engine
Simple syntax: $variable and <?scp-instruction?>
Encoding/content detection, able to handle international text encodings
Snippets instead of custom tags
URL Rewriting
Prikrutil, I think we're on the same boat. I also come to Scala from Erlang. I like Nitrogen a lot so I decided to created a Scala web framework inspired by it.
Take a look at Xitrum. Its doc is quite extensive. From README:
Xitrum is an async and clustered Scala web framework and web server on top of Netty and Hazelcast:
It fills the gap between Scalatra and Lift: more powerful than Scalatra and easier to use than Lift. You can easily create both RESTful APIs and postbacks. Xitrum is controller-first like Scalatra, not view-first like Lift.
Annotation is used for URL routes, in the spirit of JAX-RS. You don't have to declare all routes in a single place.
Typesafe, in the spirit of Scala.
Async, in the spirit of Netty.
Sessions can be stored in cookies or clustered Hazelcast.
jQuery Validation is integrated for browser side and server side validation.
i18n using GNU gettext, which means unlike most other solutions, both singular and plural forms are supported.
Conditional GET using ETag.
Hazelcast also gives:
In-process and clustered cache, you don't need separate cache servers.
In-process and clustered Comet, you can scale Comet to multiple web servers.
Follow the tutorial for a quick start.
There's also Pinky, which used to be on bitbucket but got transfered to github.
By the way, github is a great place to search for Scala projects, as there's a lot being put there.
I'd like to add my own efforts to this list. You can find out more information here:
brzy framework
It's in early development and I'm still working on it aggressively. It includes features like:
A focus on simplicity and extensibility.
Integrated build tool.
Modular design; some initial modules includes support for scalate, email, jms, jpa, squeryl, cassandra, cron services and more.
Simple RESTful controllers and actions.
Any and all feedback is much appreciated.
UPDATE: 2011-09-078, I just posted a major update to version 0.9.1. There's more info at http://brzy.org which includes a screencast.
Both Sweet and Slinky seem to be unmaintanted for about a year. Sweet Maven repo sweetsoftwaredesign.com is dead so there's even no way to download dependencies.
Note: Spiffy is outdated.
<plug>
Spiffy:
is written in Scala
uses the fantastic Akka library and actors to scale
uses servlet API 3.0 for asynchronous request handling
is modular (replacing components is straight forward)
uses DSLs to cut down on code where you don't want it
supports Scalate and Freemarker for templating
Spiffy is a web framework using Scala, Akka (a Scala actor implementation), and the Java Servlet 3.0 API. It makes use of the the async interface and aims to provide a massively parallel and scalable environment for web applications. Spiffy's various components are all based on the idea that they need to be independent minimalistic modules that do small amounts of work very quickly and hand off the request to the next component in the pipeline. After the last component is done processing the request it signals the servlet container by "completing" the request and sending it back to the client.
https://github.com/mardambey/spiffy
</plug>
You could also try Context. It was designed to be a Java-framework but I have successfully used it with Scala also without difficulties. It is a component based framework and has similar properties as Lift or Tapestry.
I have stumbled upon your question a few weeks back, but since then also learned about Circumflex. This is a nice, minimal framework that is therefore easy to learn, and it has pretty good documentation available as well.
Beside it's minimal-ness, it also claims to work well with other libraries and lets you use your own implementation of things when you need it.
At the moment Iam evaluating java web frameworks. More precisely Iam talking about GWT, JSF2 and apache wicket. One very importent criteria in this evaluation is prototyping.
The prototyping process in my company can be described by the folloing:
The customer can produce GUIs with an easy to use WYSIWYG editor, by drag&drop-ing web components on the corporate predefined website structur. There is also a need for some litte dynamic being like navigation from one frame to another.
So Iam looking for tools. These tools should not only provide nice GUIs but also deliver
some basic code, which can be forwarded to the development. The aim is to avoid missunderstandings between designers and developers as much as possible. More or less the
developers just have to implements the code, but not to implement the optical requirements.
In addition it would be desirable to customize the components thats been used in the WYSIWYG editor. Does anyone know any good tools for the mentioned frameworks (GWT, JSF2, wicket)?
One of the challenges with WYSIWYG tools for UI is that you generally have to pick between rapid prototyping and maintainable code. Even then, as soon as you want to do something that's not supported by the prototyping tool, you can implement it as you would without the prototyping tool, but your round-trip functionality (namely turning your app back into something that can be edited) is broken or crippled unless extra work is done to generate the metadata that the editor needs.
Upgrading between major releases is another issue. Vendors and groups who have developed these tools have a historically spotty record of when they stop supporting older versions, reasonably because of limited resources and sometimes difficult problems with how to track solid innovation happening in the framework itself.
My suggestion instead is to prototype with an RIA prototyping tool like Balsamiq Mockups or use a grid system like 960 Grid to generate rapid prototypes, then use a web development framework that allows your developers to run the code with or without the backend server. Wicket has a tag called that is great for this kind of thing -- web devs can fill a div with stuff that a component should generate, and Wicket devs can wrap the contents of that tag with after they implement it. Both parties can coexist for a long time that way.
Try GWT Designer for GWT.
Introduction
Quick Start Guide
Download
There's nothing like this for Wicket that I know of. The closest you would get to any kind of resource reuse from your customer would be to give them a drag and drop HTML editor - the resulting HTML could then form the basis of Wicket page/panel layout.
if you are planing to use a javascript library, you may use extjs,
http://www.sencha.com/products/js/
they have developed a nice designer
www.sencha.com/products/designer/
there is also a port of ext in GWT
www.sencha.com/products/gwt/
You have to pay for a commercial license if your application isn't open source!
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I've just started learning Scala, and the first thing I'm going to implement is a tiny web application. I've been using Erlang for the last year to implement server-side software, but I've never wrote web applications before. It will be a great experience.
Are there web-frameworks for Scala except for Lift?
Don't get me wrong, Lift looks awesome. I just want to know how many frameworks there are so that I can then choose between them. It's always a good to have a choice, but I the only thing I found was Lift.
I'm very interested in Scala, but I have not used it yet, so with that caveat, the frameworks I am aware of that are not mentioned in HRJ's answer (Lift, Sweet, Slinky) are:
Scalatra, previously Step (on GitHub)
Play 2 (on GitHub)
Pinky
I wrote a blog post about this.
To summarise, some of the options are:
Lift
Sweet
Slinky
I finally found that none were suitable for me, and developed my own little "framework". (It is not open-source yet).
I like Lift ;-)
Play is my second choice for Scala-friendly web frameworks.
Wicket is my third choice.
Following is a dump of frameworks. It doesn't mean I actually used them:
Coeus. A traditional MVC web framework for Scala.
Unfiltered. A toolkit for servicing HTTP requests in Scala.
Uniscala Granite.
Gardel
Mondo
Amore. A Scala port of the Ruby web framework Sinatra
Scales XML. Flexible approach to XML handling and a simplified way of interacting with XML.
Belt. A Rack-like interface for web applications built on top of Scalaz-HTTP
Frank. Web application DSL built on top of Scalaz/Belt
MixedBits. A framework for the Scala progamming language to help build web sites
Circumflex. Unites several self-contained open source projects for application development using the Scala programming language.
Scala Webmachine. Port of Basho's webmachine in Scala, a REST-based system for building web applications
Bowler. A RESTful, multi-channel ready Scala web framework
Try Play Framework, which also support Scala.
One very interesting web framework with commercial deployment is Scalatra, inspired by Ruby's Sinatra. Here's an InfoQ article about it.
I find Unfiltered very interesting https://github.com/unfiltered/unfiltered.
It's mentioned in IttayD's list.
Here is a presentation about it http://unfiltered.lessis.me/#0
and the video http://code.technically.us/post/942531598/doug-tangren-presents-the-unfiltered-toolkit-for
Also here there is an article with more info http://code.technically.us/post/998251172/holding-the-parameter
It must be noted that there is also a considerable interest in Wicket and Scala. Wicket fits Scala suprisingly well. If you want to take advantage of the very mature Wicket project and its ecosystem (extensions) plus the concise syntax and productivity advantage of Scala, this one may be for you!
See also:
Some prosa
Presentation
Some experience with Wicket and Scala
Announcments with reference to the project for the glue code to bind Scala closures to models
Play is pretty sweet.
It is now production ready. It incorporates: a cool template framework,automatic reloading of source files upon safe, a composable action system, akka awesomeness, etc.
Its part of the Typesafe Stack.
Having used it for two projects, I can say that it works pretty smoothly and it should be something to consider next time you are looking to learn new web frameworks.
I tend to use JAX-RS using Jersey (you can write nice resource beans in Scala, Java or Groovy) to write RESTul web applications. Then I use Scalate for the rendering the views using one of the various template languages (JADE, Scaml, Ssp (Scala Server Pages), Mustache, etc.).
There's a new web framework, called Scala Web Pages. From the site:
Target Audience
The Scala Pages web framework is likely to appeal to web programmers who come from a Java background and want to program web applications in Scala. The emphasis is on OOP rather than functional programming.
Characteristics And Features
Adheres to model-view-controller paradigm
Text-based template engine
Simple syntax: $variable and <?scp-instruction?>
Encoding/content detection, able to handle international text encodings
Snippets instead of custom tags
URL Rewriting
Prikrutil, I think we're on the same boat. I also come to Scala from Erlang. I like Nitrogen a lot so I decided to created a Scala web framework inspired by it.
Take a look at Xitrum. Its doc is quite extensive. From README:
Xitrum is an async and clustered Scala web framework and web server on top of Netty and Hazelcast:
It fills the gap between Scalatra and Lift: more powerful than Scalatra and easier to use than Lift. You can easily create both RESTful APIs and postbacks. Xitrum is controller-first like Scalatra, not view-first like Lift.
Annotation is used for URL routes, in the spirit of JAX-RS. You don't have to declare all routes in a single place.
Typesafe, in the spirit of Scala.
Async, in the spirit of Netty.
Sessions can be stored in cookies or clustered Hazelcast.
jQuery Validation is integrated for browser side and server side validation.
i18n using GNU gettext, which means unlike most other solutions, both singular and plural forms are supported.
Conditional GET using ETag.
Hazelcast also gives:
In-process and clustered cache, you don't need separate cache servers.
In-process and clustered Comet, you can scale Comet to multiple web servers.
Follow the tutorial for a quick start.
There's also Pinky, which used to be on bitbucket but got transfered to github.
By the way, github is a great place to search for Scala projects, as there's a lot being put there.
I'd like to add my own efforts to this list. You can find out more information here:
brzy framework
It's in early development and I'm still working on it aggressively. It includes features like:
A focus on simplicity and extensibility.
Integrated build tool.
Modular design; some initial modules includes support for scalate, email, jms, jpa, squeryl, cassandra, cron services and more.
Simple RESTful controllers and actions.
Any and all feedback is much appreciated.
UPDATE: 2011-09-078, I just posted a major update to version 0.9.1. There's more info at http://brzy.org which includes a screencast.
Both Sweet and Slinky seem to be unmaintanted for about a year. Sweet Maven repo sweetsoftwaredesign.com is dead so there's even no way to download dependencies.
Note: Spiffy is outdated.
<plug>
Spiffy:
is written in Scala
uses the fantastic Akka library and actors to scale
uses servlet API 3.0 for asynchronous request handling
is modular (replacing components is straight forward)
uses DSLs to cut down on code where you don't want it
supports Scalate and Freemarker for templating
Spiffy is a web framework using Scala, Akka (a Scala actor implementation), and the Java Servlet 3.0 API. It makes use of the the async interface and aims to provide a massively parallel and scalable environment for web applications. Spiffy's various components are all based on the idea that they need to be independent minimalistic modules that do small amounts of work very quickly and hand off the request to the next component in the pipeline. After the last component is done processing the request it signals the servlet container by "completing" the request and sending it back to the client.
https://github.com/mardambey/spiffy
</plug>
You could also try Context. It was designed to be a Java-framework but I have successfully used it with Scala also without difficulties. It is a component based framework and has similar properties as Lift or Tapestry.
I have stumbled upon your question a few weeks back, but since then also learned about Circumflex. This is a nice, minimal framework that is therefore easy to learn, and it has pretty good documentation available as well.
Beside it's minimal-ness, it also claims to work well with other libraries and lets you use your own implementation of things when you need it.
I am about to start on a college project (a web application) and I have never used a full-fledged IDE such as Eclipse.
Turbo C/C++, Visual Basic 6,Java Basic, a bit of SQL, ASP, etc is the sort of exposure I have.
What things should I keep in mind before starting my project using Eclipse? Are the tools mentioned appropriate for the project?(If not please give a detailed answer)
Designing - UML (Rational Rose)
Language - Google Web Toolkit
Server - Google App Engine
IDE - Eclipse
Version Control - Subversion or Mercurial?
I would definitely recommend Googling first. There are a number of tutorials regarding Eclipse as it is a very popular IDE. A quick Google search of my own brought up all these results: developing web applications in eclipse
As for other things to consider, if you are developing a web application, you'll need:
web server (Tomcat is a popular one)
possibly a database (MySQL is an open source, easy to use DB)
language (I'm assuming you're going with Java since you are using Eclipse)
Of course, you'll also need to consider how you hook everything together and what technologies you want to use to do that. (Hibernate, Spring, etc) Eclipse itself has a ton of plugins to help bring together all these various aspects.
That list from Wikipedia is a good and comprehensive list, but if you are learning or developing on your own machine, you may not necessarily need all of that.
Hope that helps.
Since it is a web application, then start with the looks of it.
First, layout a template of how your pages should look, that is what users see. If it does not look good, the users will think the application (in its entirety) is also not good (it does not matter if the code behind the view is perfect; it will just make a first bad impression).
Start with that and be consistent with the design in all your pages. SiteMesh is a nice tool to dissociate the looks of the page from the functionality you put in it.
Then think what the application will do and what it will use:
you have a database? (use something like MySQL). With what are you going to access it? (IBatis is nice; Hibernate I think is a bit heavy weight for a first project)
you need a server: Tomcat is easy to use;
are you going for a simple Servlet/JSP approach or you want to use a framework (look at Spring or Struts);
try to find the good ways of writing the application, look at service layers, DAO pattern, DTO, MVC. Also, you must understand how HTTP works.
A lot more could be said.
Ah.. and also use a source repository. It’s a must (even if you work alone on this project).
Eclipse can handle all of these tools, but then so can Netbeans.
For your first project with GWT you should read through this tutorial:
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/tutorials/1.6/gettingstarted.html
If you don't know Java then you will have some learning to do, and unlike Visual Studio your UI won't be just drag and drop, so it will be a bit harder than you are used to.
Subversion is fine, it is a nice source control, and any IDE will work with it.
Depending on your project would determine if GWT is the best choice though.
I expect UML may be overkill, and if you were following an agile methodology you wouldn't use it.
Your best bet is to get the UI done first, just have it appear as you want, and have some fake results, until you are happy with the look and feel.
Then, start to do the wiring to whatever you need on the backend.
Don't mean to be harping on you, but is Eclipse a must? For myself, in the beginning NetBeans turned out to be a really painless introduction to getting a web project up a running fast. I believe in the beginning one will spend a lot less time fighting the IDE with NetBeans.
A lot of the items from your bullet list NB makes super easy to ramp up as well. Just my $0.2
I'm starting work on a smartGWT project in a few days and I'd like to know what kind of experiences you had. To avoid making this a bashing of smartGWT or GWT or a freestyle discussion, I'm going to provide some pointers for the discussion:
Do you feel that the provided widgets are integrated well? Is there any widget you miss in particular?
Have you encountered any problems when designing your application that were caused by the framework?
Is the datasource integration as usefull as the smartClient team claims?
What methods do you use to make your smartGWT application persistent? e.g. How well do Hibernate and smartGWT play with each other?
Feel free to add anything you feel is worth pointing out.
I guess you already have your answers, but I would like to add a few more comments that may affect your decision:
Pros:
SmartGWT is the most compreensive LGPL GWT-based widgetery library you can find. So if you care for GPL pain, this is your thing
Comprehensive Showcase.
Really good performance (just check the Showcase).
Very active community in the forums.
SmartGWT extensions is another important project. For example, it has support for GWT-RPC based communication, which is not possible only with SmartGWT (unless you implement your own integration).
Rapid pace of development from the SmartGWT guys. Just count the number of releases since the SmartGWT project appeared.
Cons:
Besides the Showcase, I sometimes feel the only way to figure out how something works is by asking in the forums. This leads to a spread knowledge base. A community based wiki would be preferable.
Large amount of static files you have to use with your application (the famous 'sc' directory) which might lead to problems if your back-end is in GAE (because of the 1000 files limit).
We used SmartGWT in our last project (duration: 6 months). The following is my personal opinion:
The widgets are really great! The documentation and API is verbose. We would use client-side again.
The server-side integration works, but did not save any development time. Instead we had a lot of problems where we had to find workarounds. Also, because of the new API, no other developer can maintain the project within investing a lot of time to learn the SmartGWT API.
Some Cons:
You have to learn a totally new API instead of using Hibernate and GWT-RPC or REST.
The data integration is done automatically, that is true. But if you need some (also little) changes, you have to write XML mapping files as with Hibernate or JDO. So the benefit is gone.
The forum support is bad: You get an answer to almost every posted question. But that answer often does not help. They ask you things such as “why do you want to do that”. Or they say: “use our tool and do XYZ with it” three times, although again and again I told them this suggestion does not work. After a few answers to a question the final answer is: “you need training, buy our support”.
The commercial support is way to expensive (costs approximately as much as the SmartGWT license).
We will probably not use the server-side integration of SmartGWT again.
You can read all my "lessons learned" with Pros and Cons at my blog:
http://www.kai-waehner.de/blog/2010/12/11/lessons-learned-smartgwt-2-3-component-library-for-google-web-toolkit-gwt/
Best regards,
Kai Wähner
Do you feel that the provided widgets
are integrated well? Is there any
widget you miss in particular?
You could create any missed widgets, there is no single framework that can provide everything you want. The widgets are pretty extendable.
Is the datasource integration as usefull as the smartClient team claims?
The data (JSON/XML) can be provided by servlet services, and they are understood by the
widgets.
What methods do you use to make your smartGWT application persistent? e.g. How well do
Hibernate and smartGWT play with each other?
In the backend servlet services of GWT, you can persist your data in the store by using any persistent layer in Java. Hibernate can be just used as same as normal java app.
Do you feel that the provided widgets are integrated well? Is there any widget you miss in particular?
Yes. The widgets have a consistent API and work well together.
Is the datasource integration as usefull as the smartClient team claims?
This IMO is one of their strongest feature. Once you start using their Datasource API you realize how little code is required to get a fully functional CRUD screen
What methods do you use to make your smartGWT application persistent? e.g. How well do Hibernate and smartGWT play with each other?
Hibernate works out of the box with the SmartGWT EE version. With the LGPL version using Glead works wells
I think SmartGWT has a ton of great widgets, but but but there is a HUGE price.
Create a simple SmartGWT based project and watch how many files get loaded by your page.
That, I think, is totally against the ideals of something like GWT. While SmartGWT may be a pretty good option for people on a deadline, if you want raw performance, stay away from it.
The number of HTTP requests will simply kill your application.
Have you encountered any problems when designing your application that were caused by the framework?
Yes. When I combined Google Eclipse plugin, SmartGWT, GWT 1.6.4, and Wicket the gwt compiler would emit bad javascript. By bad javascript, I mean javascrip that would not work in webkit, or firefox. I was not able to get good javascript until I removed it completely from the Eclipse project and restarted Eclipse. So, this combination would not work and I ended up building the SmartGWT piece separately in another project. The other issue is that the Smart client seems to want control of the whole page in a css sense. So, the integrated SmartGWT module was all messed up, because styles were not isolated properly. Your mileage may vary.
Personally if you use SmartGWT only and for everything then all will most likely be fine, but if you try and mix it, well my results were disastrous. So, I no longer use it.
Just as a counterpoint to the poster above who mentioned troubles with Wicket, the SmartClient forums (forums.smartclient.com) have reports of success integrating SmartGWT with a wide variety of other technologies. This poster's problems sound like 1) a GWT bug causing bad JavaScript and 2) CSS naming conflicts between SmartGWT and Wicket, probably neither framework's fault. All of SmartGWT's style names can be renamed via the skinning system to resolve any such conflict.