Thread: Java Web application development

CAFE is targeted as a platform for Java Web application development. How, and on what basis. did you narrow down on the components that are part of the final CAFE stack? I mean, some of the components have a lot of competing alternatives; so how did you finalise your selection?

This was the most challenging and time-consuming aspect to the project. We had to try a number of choices and decide on what grounds we would select the components. We evaluated based on technology strength, community strength, and overall fit with the stack we were creating.

There will be people who prefer N etBeans to Eclipse, Spring to JSF, JBoss to JSF, and so on. We believe that in these cases people are likely to stay with their preference yet respect the merits of the selection we made. Perhaps people will find the most interesting choice to be Ingres, given the popularity of MySQL. This is worth focusing on.

The other components, such as Eclipse, Tomcat, and even the plug-ins we've included, like Subclipse and Mylyn, allow the CAFE framework to grow with the developer/user as their needs grow. For the DBMS, there were differences worth factoring. These differences manifest themselves in scalability for transactional processing, robustness, and availability. Not surprisingly, our connection with Ingres gave us an awareness of the differences between MySQL and Ingres. For these reasons, we felt Ingres was a good choice to start (and largely transparent to the novice user). As the application becomes essential to business, not having to rip 'and replace the DBMS is a huge benefit.