Interview: Farrukh Ijaz on the Vroom Web Framework

Can you compare & contrast Vroom with the following alternatives—JSF, Struts, GWT, Wicket.

JSF has nice looking UI components and navigation flow mechanism but it is an over kill because of it's architecture to serialize the complete UIView tree to change a single property of a component.

Vroom on the other hand provides similar navigation flow mechanism. It provides rule based configuration to instruct the framework as to when and how update the property of a component. If the changes are required to be made at the client end, no server call is initiated, otherwise a small Ajax request is established between the client and the server to retrieve only the data that is required to complete the change.

Struts is a good framework but it's configuration is tedious. The limitation is that we can only bind a single ActionForm with a webpage per request.

Vroom, in contrast with Struts, does not introduce any custom tag and relies on simple HTML code. This helps web developer and graphics designer to work without really worrying about how the web design will be used. Vroom through configuration file can easily bind web pages with server side java beans. In addition to this Vroom does not limit the webpage binding to a single java bean. A single web page can access one or more java beans and vice versa.

GWT appears to be another better approach to develop web applications. Perhaps Vroom has adopted a similar concept, however its use is trivial.

I never got a chance to explore Wicket.
        
Why is it named Vroom?

Since Vroom is the sound of a fast moving object and the framework provides a fast solution to develop web based applications. It just clicked my mind.

When and how did you start working on this framework?

In implementation of a web project last year, our management wanted to change the look and feel of the application and they did so twice. This involved a lot of effort at my end to incorporate new web site designs into my struts application. So I decided to develop a framework which could solve this problem once and for all.

What about tooling? Such as, specific plugins for IDEs to support Vroom?

Well, my first target is to have a fully functional NetBeans plugin. I would certainly move forward to build plugins for Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.

What's the timeline for upcoming releases and what do you expect them to provide?

Since I'm alone working on this project, it sometimes takes around three months to publish a new release. I expect that the new versions will include:

1. Captcha
2. Web Services
3. Inline SQL using JDBC

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