Friday, April 4, 2008

More about Impala scaffolding

It is important to appreciate the developers are busy people - if they are going to spend an hour looking at your project, then this has to be an hour well spent. For this reason, there is a real focus in Impala on making the developer experience as seamless as possible. Everything should work out the box. It's only when you start doing interesting stuff, stuff specific to your problem domain, that you should have to do any real work.

In my previous post I described the simple scaffolding system that is available for Impala. This is not supposed to compete with the scaffolding provided by Ruby on Rails, Grails and such projects. There is a fundamental difference in approach. Impala's scaffolding is only supposed to take you to the point where you have a clean slate to work on. It is not a code generation framework, and I have no intention of moving into that space with it. However, getting to a clean slate position - where you can actually start working on your application - is not a zero work task for many projects. For a project such as Impala which is designed to support very complex applications, you want to make this as simple as possible. I don't want developers who take time out to try Impala to spend their first hour creating directory structures, setting up class paths, and downloading third party libraries from various sources.

The scaffolding I've created with Impala is designed to help you transition to square one as quickly as possible. Once you get there you have a working Impala Hello World application, with working module definitions, a working web application, interactive integration tests and a JUnit suite. With a decent internet connection, running through the scaffolding steps should only take a few minutes - allowing time to play, try things out and do some fun stuff.

1 comment:

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