Is web application development supposed to be this hard?

Having worked on both the J2EE and Rails stacks, I find Rails to be way more productive. But that productivity can be costly: many things feel like magic if you don't understand what the framework is doing. Looking back, J2EE development seems to require too much ceremony for too little reward.

The goal for web development should be to spend time on the application's unique properties, rather than on the generic ones that everyone must build. A framework like Rails attempts to get every project on the same page for component interaction, but allows you to step outside the mold if necessary.

I strongly disagree, there are a growing number of people that are discovering that abandoning the server for UI, liberates them from this atrocious development methodology that web developers have been locked in.

Using a prototype based scripting language (Javascript) for the UI and coupling that to strongly defended (security, type safety, validation) REST services gives you a rapid UI for users to touch feel and change while Strongly typed services give you the metrics that the IT department needs to insure they are not getting crap in their system.

This is why products like flash made huge inroads over swing and other UI development products because they offered the people that use them the speed and flexibility they need.

Java on the other-hand has been the enterprise standard for as long as COBOL has not. Because it is safe and rigid and has a huge library, all the things a UI designer does not need.

For two long we have made one party or the other suffer the sins of the other development methodologies practice. Even if you are a long gunman (I now am). It is still a far more productive way to develop web applications.

The client model become very clear when one abandon the server model. The funny part is it makes both sides so drop dead simple that anything beyond the toolkits seem like overkill. The frameworks are so light they almost seem non-existent. It is very natural once one liberates oneself of the years of indoctrination of doing it the old way and stop trying to just sprinkle some in.

The biggest issue for me: FRONT-END development. Most web apps are pretty simple on the back-end, and coding database access by hand doesn't take long at all, I can live just fine without ActiveRecord.

Where I end up spending 90% of development time is on the front-end. Writing HTML code by hand (and visual tools don't help here) makes me feel like I'm in the dark ages: I miss one character and have to spend ages hunting down design issues. Javascript isn't much better for that matter.

IMO What's needed is server-side UI libraries, along the lines of windowing toolkits for desktop apps.

Reason I say server-side is because client-side libraries exist already (eg GWT) and most web apps still need SEO, perhaps unfortunately.

ASP.NET and Java Faces components don't really count either - you still have to write HTML code by hand to glue things together.

Ask any designer what a pain it is to get the layout correct in all the different browsers. How many CSS hacks are required? Just look how long it took Google engineers to make those Gmail buttons. Crazy.

Why can't we pull all these "best-practices" of laying out and rendering common components into a server-side UI framework, so a programmer can use his knowledge of the programming language of his choice to build a web application?

Moreover, encapsulating everything into components leads to re-usable code with proper inheritance (instead of html template "inheritance") - something every programmer appreciates.

This is what I'm working on now - a java library to do just that.

Sceptics will say this is a "one-size-fits-all" and it won't work. That's not what I've experienced so far. Sure, some web app may need a custom "component" - so you need to write one yourself. But from then on - it's re-usable.

Will all apps look the same, like on Windows? Although that may not be a bad thing, they won't - proper separation of concerns allows designers to style components to their liking with CSS.

The aim of a GUI framework like this is to make sure web apps stick to proper design guidelines, instead of a developer deciding that he'll make his own ajax scroll-bar cause it looks cool, though most visitors can't figure out what it is. There's a reason Apple apps look so professional. They are designed around human interface guidelines. Why re-invent the wheel for each web app?

I'm only doing this cause I got too frustrated with all the frameworks out there when trying to create my new web app. They don't solve my UI needs.

Who else feels the same way? I plan to open source the code, so if anyone wants to help, give me a shout.

I know what you're trying to say, but saying things like "Rails/Django" lack SAML is silly. It would be fairly easy to implement if needed, it's just not needed by the majority of us.

I've worked most of my career building web applications and while it isn't magic and does still take time, it doesn't take more time than I would expect usually. If it's taking 80-120 hours to put a simple app in production either you have a bad team or some seriously bad processes.

Man, writing poetry is hard. It takes me 2-3 weeks to write a haiku and months to write a sonnet.

Language doesn't matter for writing code any more than it does for writing poetry.

You need to specify a lot more details before discussing whether 80-120 hours is really fast or really slow for a given project. How many screens, 10 or 200? What kind of test coverage - none or 100% unit tested? How does it have to scale? What level of security? Do you have a style template or do you have to write one?

I work with java too. You can generate a simple crud app extremely quickly if you know what you're doing and which libraries to use.