I always had a bit of a soft spot for Sun. Their account managers were friendly, they made cool things (Solaris, dtrace, ZFS, Glassfish, OpenOffice etc.) and they basically seemed to be the result of what would happen if you took a bunch of hardware and software engineer geeks, locked them in a room and just let them get on with doing useful stuff. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to have been that good at making money.

Enter Oracle. Boooo. Hisssss.

At first, things went great. Rumours of mothballing of SPARC, Solaris and other cool things were initially unfounded. But now the dust has settled, and things have been creeping along slowly. Things like: the openoffice.org foundation ditching Oracle and renaming (effectively forking) OO to LibreOffice; the removal of the bargain-basement MySQL support option, so now it costs a minimum of $2000 to get support (was $599); the cancellation of OpenSolaris. Etc. Etc.

A while back, I rebuilt this site (and a couple of others) on the JSP/JPA/Glassfish stack, because at the time it looked awesome. I’d get to learn Java properly and make use of good quality software that was free.

But now I’m nervous. How long will it be before I don’t get glassfish for free? How long before I find myself tied to an unacceptably proprietary software stack? James Gosling recently said “With Oracle it doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to make money” and that seems to be consistent with Oracle’s actions.

So now I’m looking to rebuild everything, again. But with what?

I started reading around, and found an interesting video comparing some popular web frameworks. This seemed interesting, because the premise specifically seemed to be comparing popular web frameworks as an alternative to J2EE. Django scored pretty well, and I’ve heard many good things about it, and so I decided to give it a go.

In short, I’m impressed. In a remarkably short time, I’ve built around 80-90% of the functionality of the site. I know very little python, but have still managed to put something together that works and needs practically zero configuration. I fully realise that in the case of a framework, the dev is hugely shielded from the amount of lifting that goes on under the covers (all of which adds to latency and hurts performance) but everything feels lightweight, efficient and easy. I like it.