With RubyRails promising to take the world by storm there have been a number of lesser known rapid application development tools. I want to highlight a couple of options for anybody who may be interested in a modern day RAD solution. If anyone has experience with any of these suites feel free to comment.
- Grails: Should be the first shopping trip for any Java developer that considers RubyRails.
- RIFE: a full-stack web application framework with tools and APIs to implement most common web features. (Claims to support meta programming.)
- Turbo Gears: My buddy just pointed this one out to me today. It’s a Python based tool that promises to remove accidental complexities.
- Django: Another Python RAD tool. Somebody commented hipped me to it about a day or so ago. I looked breifly at it and was impressed. I wonder how it compares to Turbo Gears?
- Open Xava: A JEE app generator that uses XML as input and produces full functional enterprise Java artifacts. (Hibernate descriptors, Java Beans optionally EJB beans, web tier compoenents and more.) I heard about it first on Javalobby. Sounds interesting.
My list is incomplete. There are many more that I will fill in later. For now I’m just planting the seeds for exploration.
Can't see nothing but the source code 
Grails is another framework in this category. Grails runs on the JVM and brings the whole “coding by convention” paradigm to that arena. Grails leverages several best of breed technologies in that space (Groovy, Spring, Hibernate, Sitemesh) to greatly simplify building web applications for the Java platform. Grails is powerful stuff (and fun too!).
A lot of interesting things are happening around Groovy and Grails right now. Look for more to come! 🙂
I read your blog entry in my google reader and immediately thought to myself, I should leave a comment here about grails. And then I get here and Jeff has already beat me to it. Anyway, +1 for grails.
Funny,
Grails was missing from my list. I was mentally thinking that Grails is a given due to my many ramblings about Grooy. I should remember that there are quite a number of new readers who have been visiting and who are not familiar with my affinity to Groovy technologies. Regardless of my reasons, there is no excuse for the omission. Grails goes number one on my list.