Recent evaluations of web frameworks while on vacation

My wife Carol and I have been visiting family in Rhode Island this week and since our grandkids are in school on weekdays, I have had a lot of time to spend writing the fourth edition of my Java AI book and also catching up on reevaluating web frameworks.

Although my main skill sets are in data/text mining, general artificial intelligence work and Java server side development, I do find myself spending a lot of time also writing web applications. In the last few years, I have done a lot of work with Rails (and some Sinatra), GWT, and most recently with SmartGWT because one of my customers really liked SmartGWT's widgets. (Note: if you are in the San Jose area and want to work on a SmartGWT project with me, please email me!)

For my own use, because I have strong Java and Ruby skills, the combination of Rails, GWT, and SmartGWT works very well for me when I need to write a web app.

That said, I have spent time this week playing with Google's Closure Javascript tools and less time with ClojureScript that uses Google's Closure. Frankly, both Closure and ClojureScript look fantastic, but I have a personal bias against making Javascript development a career and although ClojureScript works around this issue by compiling a nice subset of Clojure to Javascript I am concerned that the market for developing with ClojureScript is probably small. If you do want to write Lisp code on the server and client side definitely spend a few evenings playing with ClojureScript because it may be a good fit for you. I have also recently had a good experience with Clojure and the Noir web framework.

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