Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

I've become a little disillustion with all the various agile frameworks out there.

At first, I had high hopes for Ruby on Rails, but after working on it for a year and a half, I decided that Ruby is a terrible language, and Rails is an aweful framework built on top of a terrible language.

Naturally, as a Java programmer, I decided to give Grails a try (basically Groovy on Rails). My first impressions were very positive. It seemed to overcome a lot of the issues I had with RoR, and Groovy seemed like a good language to work in. But as you can see from my previous posts, the framework has some fairly fundamental flaws with it.

So where is an agile-wannabe supposed to go?

I'm not a real fan of PHP, so CakePHP and all those frameworks are out (especially since none of them really provide a powerful database layer). Django would be another solution, but try as I might, I just cannot overcome the terrible syntax.

So - I'm now wondering if I should experiment a little on my own (what with the government paying my bills now) and see if I can develope my own framework, hopefully overcoming all the problems with the others. But what language to use?

Well, since I'm a Java guy, why not BeanShell? It would have the same benefit as Groovy in that the entire Java API and all libraries are readily accessible through it. It's syntactially identical to Java (being a scriptable Java, really). And it's a dynamic language, so I could still work in some "auto-magic" that seems to be all the rave with agile frameworks.

I'm not sure if I should take this a step further, and experiment with making it language neutral, meaning any language with has a Java runtime (JACL for TCL, Jython for Python [yecch], JRuby, Groovy, ObjectScript, Rhino for JavaScript). I may end up having to limit it to OO-only languages (thus dropping JACL and Rhino).

Any suggestions or thoughts?