So Declan sent me this article the other day. Something from JSFCentral about the development of the website for a “Major” insurance company. Really not much to it but what was rather interesting was the tools that they needed to build this website.
- Dev Platform
Eclipse, Java 6, Maven 3 - UI
MyFaces 2, Facelets, Richfaces3 and Tomahawk - Backbone
Spring 3 framework - Database
Hibernate, String JDBC, DB2, Oracle - Other
Spring Integration, MongoDB, JAX-RS, AXIS, Dojo, jQuery, Freemarker, Blaze rules engine, Drools, Apache, OBM MQ Series - Deployment Platform
JBoss AS5, Tangosol Cache Server
I wasn’t sure if I should say “Wow!” or “WTF?” I admit that I don’t know what half these tools even are but dang that’s a lot of parts for a website. It’s not even Facebook or Twitter. It’s “only” getting 80,000 hits a day which just doesn’t seem like a lot for the amount of tools and work a team of 35 people put into this.
I’m not suggesting that Domino and XPages could be used to built this site. Maybe it can and maybe it can’t. There’s not enough information to even guess at that. But if this is the norm of non XPages websites it sure does make me appreciate what XPages gives us out of the box to develop applications and how easy it is to deploy any applications on the Domino servers.
Now I’m all for embracing and learning non Domino web techniques – but looking at that list I wouldn’t even know where to start.
There’s a lot of things I don’t like about Domino and XPages. There’s just so many things that should be better. But I think for the next several days at least, I’ll just focus on all the good things that I do like about the platform.
🙂
UPDATE: Vince had an interesting followup post here.