It’s *really* hard to get good trend data out of Google trends because you have to consider every term and how to group them into some value on the chart.

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flex/

Especially the language reference:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/index.html

The Flexcoders list is also a good resource (and very high traffic):

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/

Finally, the Flex SDK is open source so if you don’t like the way a component is coded, you can either monkey patch, cut and paste to make a new component, or, most commonly, extend the original component and override one or more of the main functions (ie. createChildren, measure, updateDisplayList, etc.). You’ll also find that Adobe is much more open then it used to be. As an example, Adobe wanted to change the prefix on the new Flex 4 components by adding an Fx To the start of every component name but the Flex community loudly objected so Adobe took the criticisms onboard and changed their mind. If you use Spring, look into the Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Also, there’s lots of good Flex frameworks available such as Mate, Swiz, PureMVC and Parsley.

I am a Java developer and am looking for the best way to handle the UI for web and/or thick-client development. I have used Swing (long ago) and SWT (more recently). I am looking hard at either GWT or Flex. Using technology originally from Adobe makes me nervous as in the past I have not been satisfied with their level of support and/or documentation.

In any case, have you seen the Flex widget samples?

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/tourdeflex/web/#

According to studies, when consumers were presented with 24 choices among varieties of a product, they much more often did not buy ANY of the products, than if they were presented with only 6 alternatives.

I wrote about the paradox of choice applied to web application development at http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/paradox-of-choice-in-web-development

That’s excellent to hear, I don’t have that much insight into what the GWT user-base looks like.

What tools do you guys use to develop your GWT apps? Do you get the GWT tooling support you want out of them currently or do you wish you had a specific killer tool that would make your life considerably easier?

We used GWT, GWT-EXT at Encana Oil & Gas for a well document management tool and it worked great. Now the SmartGWT framework I am using for another Health Canada project. So companies are using GWT and finding that the development time can be reduced while their widgets are powerful and practical. I really do wonder why people love developing in JavaScript and then trying to support multiple versions of browsers. GWT supports the core 4 browsers with no hassle.

That’s a damn impressive component show-case, but even being in the Java community I’m not seeing that many companies or contractors rolling out GWT apps as I thought would be the case after Google announced it. If anything I see more folks normalizing on JSF (hopefully it gets better in 2.0) and a lot of Java developers looking more closely at Flex.

Then after seeing all of the examples of SmartGwt compared to the other frameworks, you will then understand.

Its easy and you get to work all in Java and it comes with a debugger that also supports debugging in Java. Who wants it to be simple…I do.

Spring is most suitated framework for Buissness logic layer and widely used with Integration with another frameworks like Struts,Wicket,JSF and.,,lab..la. So Spring is Common part with when we design most of the applications. So obiviously I feel its widely used. Also recently Spring Framework 3.0 is released with further features. go for more detail for my blog for this or spring official site.

Here now question remains which one from Struts, Wicket and JSF.

Struts:- People are posting about it from 95. so google have lot of stock! we know struts is no more. So less chances of use in new application devolpment.

Wicket:-Wicket is all about simplicity. It is Swing for Web Applications. There are no configuration files to learn in Wicket. Wicket is a simple collection of components. In Wicket, your web applications will more closely resemble a Swing application than a JSP application. If you know Swing, yes you know most of the Wicket!
None of the existing frameworks are appealing to me in terms of quickness, ease of development, easy to understand etc.

JSF:- It is another framework on which started to work recently. most of the Drag and drop devlopment is provided and looks very good. I see its growing widely. Still I need to learn lot in this, you can add here.

I missed here about other frameworks as i don’t have much Idea about them. you can make valuable addditions for us.

Thanks for this work but :

Jboss Seam includes Jsf …

So the comparaison is not very easy , I think taht your graph is not objective.

NOTE: I only used ‘asp.net’ to represent .NET to have a more focused trend. Using ‘.net’ almost completely flattens out the competition technologies and there is no guarantee that I wouldn’t also be capturing a ton of client-side development using .NET as well.

I cannot even begin to calculate how much more productive – and creative – the framework has allowed me to be.

So, I recognise the trend and understand your conclusions – but these kinds of comparison are never conclusive. However much I loved firing up Textmate and coding RoR – Grails has (for me I stress) far, far more actual benefit when combining with my code base and experience.

PHP just keeps on going – I agree. Although I cannot for one second understand why. I am not trying to knock it’s fantastic contribution and ubiquitous nature – but have you ever joined in a PHP based project half-way through! Never again for me! Many other people must feel very differently from me, however.

IIRC a lot of the huge new social networking sites out there *are* written in PHP… it’s a language that won’t die, but also doesn’t seem to grow. It’s been insanely popular since it came out, but doesn’t dominate enough to ruin Java/Ruby/etc. out of the picture and from what I’ve seen the tooling is lack-luster with the only good things coming out of a commercial vendor.

Given *how much* is written and deployed in PHP I’m really surprised by that… you look in the Java realm and we are tripping over ourselves with tools/libraries/etc.

Glad to hear that PHP is going strong… I know *I* owe a lot to that language, namely with this site

Secondly, I think job ads are a more reliable indication of usage of a technology than search trends for many of the reasons stated above. Of course, the ads represent only a small percentage of the people using a technology but they do provide some indication of the relative use of these technologies in the real world.

Thirdly, it’s not the words “java spring” and “java jsf” – this would be meaningless – it’s the job ads that contain both the words “java” and “spring”, and ads that contain both “java” and “jsf”. The word “java” is not really important – it’s only there to filter out the noise. If you want to compare which proportion of the job ads for spring also contain jsf, you could do a search like:

java spring, java spring jsf

and you can see what proportion of the spring ads also contain jsf.

I think there is some information to be gained from this but of course it doesn’t really answer the question about which is the hottest *web* framework, as spring for example is obviously most commonly used as an application framework rather than a web framework per se.