Recommend some open source web frameworks for a fun project

Question

I maintain very dull in-house business software for a living. Technologies included here are Java, Struts, Spring MVC, jsp, wicket, and a few others. I think it's time to branch out and learn something new.

I am hoping to show myself with a side project that writing code can, in fact, be fun (in some plane of the universe), and that I haven't wasted the past few years of my life doing something I can never love or have fun doing.

I'm thinking of having a fantasy-sport style web site - obviously much, much smaller with regards to features and all that. I was hoping I could get some recommendations for the newest or cleanest frameworks that will allow me to accomplish such a project. My goals are to work on following a real development process instead of just hacking a bunch of crap into an already crappy application on a daily basis. Also I will strive to follow best practices and create good, clean, understandable code that I don't shudder at the thought of having to modify. It's hard to do this at work, because the software I work on has already been developed by 50 guys from various continents that never took the time to design anything before jumping into coding.

I would need a simple database to store users and their picks for each event. Also at my job, the login security is all handled by another group completely. Do people usually write their own login systems from scratch, or are there open source utilities for that as well? I'd be interested in those, as my site will need to have a user login system, and be secure.

I had ruby and rails installed on my computer the last time I conjured up the motivation for this idea, but that was nixed by a hard drive crash. I figured before I just jumped straight to rails for this idea, that I would get a few other opinions off stack overflow to see if people liked something else that I didn't know about.

Also, if anyone has any good resources for how to think about OO design, I could brush up on that as well. I'm looking for anything that will help me to just think about the design from the start and how to get my thoughts into a diagram. I'd like it not to focus so much on patterns and other principles as much as just how to get started and actually put my thoughts in a professional document that I can use to build my project from. I tried to practice this prior to a card game that I wrote, and it got way too complicated way too fast, and the results ended up being not so great.

Answer 1

I’m more familiar with Django, although like you, the only frameworks I’ve really used are the Java/Struts/Spring/JSP, etc. The automatically generated administration interface in Django is amazing coming from these, and it comes with its own authentication system too.

Unless you’re especially predisposed against Python, I think you should give it a go.

Answer 2

Ruby on Rails, Python on Django, PHP on (not sure -- maybe Zend? or CakePHP?), are probably the most popular frameworks if I understand correctly that you want to learn a new language. If I misunderstood you, and you'd rather stick with Java, GWT seems pretty cool -- it's the only real way to avoid "explicitly" writing Javascript (if you DO want to learn and use some Javascript, I personally am in love with Dojo, but jQuery is substantially more popular: those are two good popular frameworks you should consider, though there are others of course, like for all languages I mentioned so far).

One advantage of picking Python and Django is that they work particularly well with Google App Engine (and with Dojo, too, thanks to the cool dojango project!) -- GAE supports JVM too, now, but it's supported Python for a much longer time and the Python side of it is more solid and complete at this time. So, if that's the technology stack you choose, you get to develop and deploy for free, on highly scalable infrastructure, at least until your app gets more than a few million page views per month -- and you really minimize your system adminsitration hassles, all you do is basically to code and write one simple configuration file.