Ashish Jain Blog

Coming to topic of this blog, whenever I think of implementing some idea or start chalking up some plans to develop something, first thing comes to my mind, which web framework? Which technology stack of APIs. How I can get other developers involved with-out spending time on discussing these things. When we talk about Lean startup, it means you should be able to develop some features quickly and deliver it. As user experience ‘demands’, you are agile enough to change backlog continuously, with-out changing technologies or whole project direction.

Now problem is, when we start spending time developing code using traditional frameworks (or technical stack), then we are introducing rigidness to whole continuous process. 

Example: Lets say, you are using Apache tiles + JSP + Spring framework + Hibernate, to formulate any development efforts. If you need to change DB schema, need to change JSPs & their layouts, then it will take a lot of effort to change everything.  That’s one of reason, I think, we have a lot of  PHP based frameworks for startups. Because they are missing layers of layers of configurations. (See my older post https://jframeworks.com/2008/07/03/java-products-but-php-based-website/ touching this subject)

(Note: This is written with Java/JEE APIs in mind)

1. If you are in same boat as me, I have choosen ‘Spring Framework’. Spring Framework is not a framework, it has become underlying nerve of almost all project. It’s all IOC. 
2. I recently dump technologies like ORM (Hibernate/JPA) in favor of old school JDBC (See my other post on Why?)
3. I am sticking to JSPs and old school JSP includes. Why? Because my team should be able to introduce any jsp with minimal time and minimal impact. Any developer with little experience of java, can work around JSPs. 
4. At last but least, standardize html technologies including CSS and JavaScript libraries.

When we talk about this, we talk about all other tasks to give light to a written code. This involves everything like recording requirements, maintaining backlog, continuous builds & deploys.
Traditionally 
Generally, if we are bunch of developers, we think, of getting one build server and install some open source tools like ‘Hudson’. Also make maintain source control repositories using subversion ourselves.

• Provision a development integration server.
• Provision DB servers for different stages of a project
• Provision a Unix box, for source control. 
• And then find people, to install those and manage those. 

Welcome to world of PaaS and Saas

If you have experience enough, we know, getting into maintaining tools ourselves, we will be putting hours, which we could have been writing code. Hence, I am in favor of, why not use online services? For example, altassian group provides execellent suite of all tools in one single subscription package. Link http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/ .  Personally, I am big fan of JIRA and used Confluence. So I don’t want to waste my time, learning new tool or spend time, how to install/maintain it. There are lot of other paid subscription services available like http://beanstalkapp.com/ and many others. Point is, I will rather buy subscription for these services and use it.  (If I need my car serviced, I will drive to auto shop, rather than setting up a new one in my garage 🙂 )

Excellent examples of PaaS & Saas

• Xeround, They are new kid on block, providing DB hosting as a service (SaaS model). I have experimented with their services. At least for startup or low volume work, they can be right fit. You can always do cost-benefit-DBA_salary-Ping_time analysis.
• Atlassian Studio: Provide hosted services for Subversion/ JIRA / Bamboo, confluence wiki and even agile tools like Greenhopper. Frankly speaking, I am ok with spending $125/mo with them, if I am seriously spending my time for startup. Think of productivity. 
• Amazon EC2, If you need to provision a server for any reason (or live production hosting) This is one very good option. I am using their micro instance for running my dedicated MySQL server. I even hosted wordpress blog there. (A week back, I moved to blogger.com) (To save some more bucks, I am using ‘Spot Instances’. )

Basically, you need Laptop and your favorite IDE to start a #LeanStartup. By the way, if you not using Maven for builds, you need to start from there. 

Why or Why Not AppFuse ?
For those, who don’t know, AppFuse is excellent open source project, which allows you to download & use it’s pre-built projects. It provides different projects with different technology stack with web interface. Yes, it is good starting point, when you want to see certain API in action and modify, experiment with it. But from my point of view, it’s more like proof of concept. It can be good starting point for you, if you starting from scratch, as long as it matches you pre-determined technical stack. For my own project, it doesn’t. I was spending more time, working around it, hence I decided to write some ‘generic’ web framework from scratch. Also adding different goodies like separate admin, user interface, cache support using annotations etc. Hopefully, I will release it, it’s first alpha release as open source soon.

End Note:
In this post, I tried to look at technologies side of #LeanStartups.  This is something, which can be black hole for many startups if not controlled to begin with. Programming languages like PHP can be easy step for day 1, but when things get serious, we need serious enterprise friendly language and tools supporting it. And Lean development model (as described above, using Java), can serve both purposes of starting easily and able to sustain long term.