Here is nice, compact article by Martin Fowler on the Inversion of Control pattern.  I’m revisiting the Spring Framework after stepping away from it for a while.

It’s always important when building a new products to learn from the “pains” of previous projects.  Reminds me of those poor suckers that implemented the full J2EE 1.0 stack back in the day.  Wait, I was one of them. *doh*

Anyway, what’s interesting is it seems that most new architectures are straying away from the Java stack.  According to the case studies at Highscalability.com, most of the new architectures are LAMP, Ruby on Rails or Django based.  I don’t have practical experience on these platforms so I can’t tell you why but folks seem to tell me its a ton easier and quicker to develop.  My biggest fears are …

• Long Term Manageability.   Well, this is a problem for any architecture but its seems that Java keeps things together cleaner.
• Performance.  Java has a big head start in this area.

For a startup, these would seem like secondary concerns.  It’s probably a good thing when you start having these problems and by then you can throw tons of VC money at it.

Java verses LAMP verses Ruby on Rails Django

I’m still torn.