This weekend was the official ‘exploring’ web frameworks.

The first start was updating my NetBeans to 6.7.1 – I’m sure there are other great IDE’s out there, but NetBeans seems to be fairly easy to pickup and have support for many of the frameworks I wanted to explore.  NetBeans offered up tutorials for the first 4 below that I walked through:

1. Grails (I have posted already on my first Grails experience)

2. Spring MVC

3. Struts

4. Google Web Toolkit

Then , another framework I’ve been wanting to explore is Django (MVC framework for Python) – I’m on step 3 of … got it setup, created models, running it on sqlite, configuring the admin screens, etc.. getting into views right now.

So far … quite interesting.  (In the past I’ve walked through some Ruby on Rails tutorials as well)

Why am I doing this ?  Well, for one, it’s extremely educational to see how other frameworks and languages work.  I’m interested in seeing how they are evolving.

For the most part, all begin with a model view controller setup.  Another interesting piece is all tend to revolve around the domain classes that are created.  I see this mostly in Grails and Django.

Since I’ve primarily developed in the .net world, first (and sometimes still) with asp.net webforms, then with my preferred asp.net mvc  – it’s refreshing to step outside of that world.

I should throw in as well, I did a tutorial with Hibernate and Java, and was pleased to see how well the NHiberate developers have kept NHibernate ‘close to the bone’ to Hibernate  (I’m a big NHibernate fan if you don’t know this already – lol)