Two unrelated articles I read last week are turning my focus to Delphi web development strategies.

The first was a very interesting article on Artima Developer about "Twitter on Scala". This is actually a conversation with Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointer by Bill Venners, which is both the Artima founder and a very strong backer of Scala. In the article Twitter developers discuss how they moved some of the site backend on Scala (while the core is built in Ruby) for performance and scalability reasons, among others. Very nice reading, I have to say. And Scala is certainly worth a look.

The second was a blog post by Dennis Gurock (author of DelphiFeeeds.com) titled "Choosing a Web Development Stack". The first article highlights the key requirements, while in the second he evaluates Java, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, and PHP... showing why he ended up picking PHP. A very nice summary of pros and cons of various technologies.

As I do most of my web development in Delphi, how would it fit in the overall picture? Right now Delphi lacks in cross-platform support (although you are reading a blog powered by a Delphi application running on Linux), web server integration, but most of all there isn't a robust framework geared towards web development. Over the last year or so I'm spent some time (too little?) elaborating on a Delphi framework based on easy deployment (which means, limited need to recompile the core engine), flexibility, speed, and more. My idea is to base it on a REST architecture, both for returning web pages and for returning data to Ajax calls (or stand-alone client applications).

I have many ideas and some code ready. So the plan would be to use this blog to layout the foundations and then, if there is enough consensus, start a project around it. The initial goal is to give away the server for free, with the option of making it open source as it gets a little more robust and complete. If no one cares, no big deal... I can move on to other work. By the way, some time ago I named the project DWARF, for Delphi Web Application Rest Framework.