[porker]

> looking at Play as a potential new framework for a CRUD app with a very fancy UI.

Do you know of any frameworks that are good for that (but let you easily reach down for complex logic, e.g. where data processing or AI is needed)?

Every project I do needs some form of CRUD, and making it work AND be pleasing to interact with takes a lot of time. I don't mind the language, just someone, somewhere must have solved this already...

[fat0wl]

Hmmm I don't know. I think the conventional wisdom is to use a service-oriented architecture with the best front-end tools you can find.

The advantage of JVM in my opinion is that a lot of their toolchains have this approach in mind and simplify integration of the stack. Java can be used for a lot, when you add in other JVM languages that is a lot of possibility. Then again, if you design proper web services you can make almost any front/back-end interact, the trick is just in minimizing that amount of impedance.

[fat0wl]

(In fact, for heavy processing stuff I'm pretty sure it's architecturally preferred to have it on a separate machine than the web-app server)

[fat0wl]

also just so you know i think AI, for example, is beyond the scope of this web stack quest. When "complex" is used in a web app it means concurrency issues, asynchronicity, eventing. Not necessarily computational stuff beyond that