Rapid turnaround is vital

Here’s a great 36-minute presentation by Sean Kelly on designing better web apps.

He compares a variety of web frameworks:

• J2EE
• Ruby on Rails
• Zope
• Django
• JBoss

One of his main points is that rapid turnaround is the key to a successful User Interface. He says that 3/4 of time and effort is spent on dealing with changes the user wants. So move this button there, tweak this color here… Only 1/4 of time and effort is in planning. (Not sure where these stats come from, but it’s a reasonable enough WAG). As a result, older UIs built with compiled languages just suck (his word, but I share the sentiment). It takes too much effort to make changes. Today using scripting languages, we get rapid turnaround in UI development. We now focus less on widgets and more on layout. And developers work with designers to this end. So Sean asks the question of what frameworks are good for this purpose.

Well, I won’t spoil his story too much. Basically, the web frameworks that use scripting languages (and the ones above use Python and Ruby) are all comparable and tremendously better than things like J2EE and JBoss. Though he prefers one over others, it appears to be more of a personal preference — not everyone will agree with some of his details such as Rails having great documentation.

One language he doesn’t discuss that I’d really like see compared is Flex. Also, something like Flexiblerails that uses Rails for the web application framework and Flex for constructing views.