[rufugee]

As someone who recently came back to Java from a 5 year stint with Rails, I can safely say this is not true by any stretch of the imagination. If you stick to those tools in the Java ecosystem which meet your requirements, you can be incredibly productive.

The problem is that the Java world is full of over-engineered solutions which are really targeted at extremely large enterprise applications surrounded by a community of folks who like to menturbate about them. As a startup, you don't need to focus on those solutions. You'll not need 99% of them.

However, you can choose bit and pieces. I'm using Vaadin, JPA and Guice and finding it incredibly productive and am able to deliver functionality in far less time than it took me in Rails. I'm not using 90% of the Java EE stack, but it's available to me if/when I need it.

Rails was a great thing for the software development world. It drove convention over configuration and caused a lot of the competing technologies to pause and question why things were the way they were. But IMHO, managing the whole Rails stack (rails + coffeescript + css in our case) across a group of people became a chore. YMMV, but the statically-typed nature of Java along with the very capable technology stacks you can assemble have eased our daily jobs tremendously.

[wyqueshocec]

Rails is not great, IMO.

I use Spring every day as part of my day job, and I agree that a lot of the development time slowness is due to culture/enterprise. But that is a serious problem that can't be readily dismissed.

[elechi]

How are you finding Vaadin work out for you? What are you using it for? What version? The 6 series or the new 7 series?

[rufugee]

So far, so good. It's very different from your typical template-driven approach. We have a decent amount of Swing experience, and developing with Vaadin feels similar (but much easier) than Swing.

If you are developing business-facing applications and not just consumer web sites, as we are, I think Vaadin makes a lot of sense. It might even make sense for consumer sites, but that's not our current target.

[rufugee]

I should also say: putting together a new screen (form or otherwise) in Vaadin is extremely fast. It's the fastest I've ever been able to develop web-based UIs, simply because all I'm forced to think about is Java.

[elechi]

I see. I found it to be a little difficult in terms of dealing with data, especially messing around with the Table object. Best of luck to your project.

[rufugee]

The JPAContainer and SQLContainer it provides makes this reasonably easy.