But we want to change technologies for similar reasons Benoit mentioned (even though CF in London is not impossible to recruit for).

I wanted to go to Grails/Groovy but found it near impossible to recruit for. Most developers seemingly being contractors in London and charging a lot of cash. The recruiters are telling me its a shrinking sector after an initial bit of popularity a few years back, which i found surprising (and disappointing).

So my next choice was .Net MVC which I’m in the early stages of familiarising myself with since we use an MS stack already IIS7, SQLS 2008, and a couple of the dev guys have some if limited experience. Compared to the horror of web forms its actually quite a pleasant experience.

Scala would be a bit too much I fear. I have played with it, but fear the syntax could get quite impenetrable and I’m not sure there is a mature web platform yet.

I came from a Java background but was reluctant to go there, needing something lightweight, quick to develop for and easy to deploy.

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
export CATALINA_HOME=/opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.23
export JAVA_OPTS=-Dweceem.config.location=file:/Websites/cms/weceem.properties
export CATALINA_OPTS=”-Xms756m -Xmx756m -XX:NewSize=256m
-XX:MaxNewSize=512m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m”
…. and also in ehich directory i need to put weceem.properties file ?

my tomcat server work fine cause its indetfy the weceem war files but it doesent work when i have tryied to start the cms…tomcat web application manager says that the ; FAIL – Application at context path /weceem-1.1.2 could not be started….i think because of that that i dont know where exactly to declair environment variables… on my computer or somwhere in tomcat servelet..???
please guy help me a bit cause i really would like to taste wecemm cms…happy new year to all…

That’s reason enough for me not to use Scala. Far more time is spent reading code than writing code.

I’ve been developing with Grails for a little more than 2 years. There is a lot of exciting stuff in the upcoming 2.0 release. Its also clear the community has been putting a lot of effort into the documentation. With over 700 plugins, its very easy to wire in new features.

Another important aspect to consider is the quality of the community support. VMWare has hired core team members of Grails and Groovy. When I’ve turned to the forums or twitter for support, I’ve found that the VMWare guys are prompt to respond & are very helpful.

I’ve been using Groovy on a Jboss Seam project in my company and recently started learning Scala.

We got some developers in the team that just started coming to Java from Delphi, so they already have some work to do, and Groovy is easier for its learning curve; also, pretty productive.

I tried using Jboss Seam plugins with Scala Eclipse plugin and it proved itself to be somewhat unstable. Since Groovy++ worked neatly (giving us compilation errors where pure dynamic groovy wouldn’t), probably we will be sticking with groovy for now.

Seasoned Scala developers seems to be able to deliver some very powerful and hard-to-understand code, and we are nowhere near a scala developers nest or something like that. That is a problem when you got developers starting on it. Also our company is just starting, so it’s better to stick with a technology which doesn’t eat our budget on courses, consulting and the likes.

We are nowhere in need for what scala offers, at least for now. But i’ll keep an eye on it and check its development and new resources.

Thank you for a well written, clearly thought out, and most importantly, unbiased article.

Since I consult I perform similar evaluations on the market. The metrics tend to be approximate and error prone, but trending can be seen over time.

But I wonder if we have forgotten the lessons from COBOL which made programming accessible to a much wider audience.

Functional languages tend to be hard and require more mathematically adept developers. They also may perform well on multi-core architectures and seem to be a good fit for specialized computation like business rules.

Java shops seem to run under the illusion they benefit from a single language, but the reality is web developers also use HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, etc.

Grails folks remind us we can resort to Java for special cases like computationally intensive code Do you think that will apply to functional languages as well?