The intranet application is going well and I am wriiting a lot of ExtJS javascript. Currently we are using PHP. We have a frontcontroller that directs users to the login page or the application. The frontcontroller for the application will be in Javascript. The “data controller” for the application currently sends JSON to the frontend. The data controller is written in PHP.

I have a prototype that uses Java Servlets in place of PHP and I like this system better. The biggest drawback is the time that it takes to compile the WAR file and restart the servlet after modifying my Java code — about 20 seconds. I am using Tomcat. The static content, including all of the javascript, css, and images, have been removed from the WAR file and are served by Apache. Thus modifying and viewing changes happens almost instantaneously.

I’m going to evaluate DWR once the backend developers get the SOAP interface running.