Friday in Crested Butte

Web Frameworks Jam, continued

This was the last day of the workshop (Friday). We finished up what we could and then recorded a podcast describing what we had done and detailing our experience.

In general, we all found that one of the barriers is installation and setup of the framework (from a development standpoint). All of us battled installation and configuration issues. Spring is simply complicated. Google Web Toolkit is immature in terms of packaging issues. TurboGears is still in alpha and we were definitely chasing a moving target (versions a6, a7, and a8 were released during our one week stay in Crested Butte). We didn’t battle deployment issues (yet), but these hold concern for all of us as well.

As for my personal feeling? I still want to get some more airtime with Google Web Toolkit. I’ve done a little with it at home, but would like to get into it in more depth and look forward to its maturation. And I’m totally smitten with TurboGears. I’m going to use it for some small projects and see what I think. I have some customers that I think might benefit from it, once version 1.0 is released and things are a bit more stable. Spring? Well, I’m still unsure about that. I think that the question in all of our minds is where IS the limit where the lightweight frameworks break down and more complicated frameworks like Spring (or even Struts) become necessary?

The TurboGears team is hot on doing a TurboGears Jam at some point (and several of the other attendees from the jam expressed interest in doing that as well). Of course, logistically, it’s a bit complicated, so I’m not sure if/when it will happen, but it would be great.

As for the hike, on Friday, we hiked the 401. This is an absolutely beautiful trail, also up by Gothic. We were surprised by a huge tent that someone had dragged up the mountain. It was an out and back, and the wildflowers were gorgeous.

Hike on the 401 photos