I used Symfony extensively in my contractor days, and I'm fairly partial. It doesn't care much about your database schema, so it's pretty easy to throw it atop a pre-existing model definition -- or a random set of tables which vaguely resemble a model, if squinting from a distance. The learning curve isn't too steep if you've worked with other MVC frameworks, and there's plenty of documentation. That said, I haven't touched it in at least a year, so I don't know what it's up to these days -- there might be frameworks more suited to the task, or something lighter weight; personally, I've since moved to Django for non-work projects, but mostly because my pet problems fit nicely into python's list comprehensions and lazy evaluations. That said, I really want to echo what David Naughton said. If you guys already have tools that you're familiar with, why not use them? Is there something in Groovy/Grails that's working against you? For what it's worth, every framework's going to be pretty much the same; there's just varying degrees of hand-holding and "oh yeah, we already thought of that." Cheers, Garrett On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Nathaniel Sigrist <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Or you could grab php zend. Php is already an extensive language with a lot off functions built into it. Zend has even more functionality if you are really lazy :-) (all free of course). Ruby has been growing in popularity and has a large following with plenty of published books. If you are looking for support check out stackoverflow.com > > Craig Gjerdingen <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >>I don't know if you're open to it, but I'm pretty partial to Microsoft .Net >>framework and platform stack. >> >>Pretty much everything from the front end to the back end is totally >>integrated. It is a wonderful developer/designer experience. >> >>Additionally, these tools are all available for NO additional cost to you as UMN >>staff. But you have to ask for Visual Studio 2010 professional edition from >>[log in to unmask] because they don't list it on >>https://download.software.umn.edu/ any more (now it is in netfiles) >> >>In particular the combination of the powerful Visual Studio 2010 IDE, .Net >>framework 4.0, Entity Framework or NHibernate, and ASP.Net MVC 2 are a >>formidable offering. Again all of this has NO added cost to you. It's all free. >> >>There are a ton of IOC and ORM offerings in the .Net space so you can easily >>choose one to your liking. >> >>MEF and Unity (dependency injector) are fairly cool too. >> >>Support, Training, Developer Communities, Books, knowledgeable consultants, >>campus expertise, 3rd party vendors are all available. >> >>One configuration you might want to look at to get started (where someone >>else has done the work of picking the pieces for you) would be to look at >>http://SharpArchitecture.net/ which is stored on GitHub at >>http://github.com/codai/Sharp-Architecture >> >>Before you choose Ruby/Rails I suggest you investigate deployment difficulties. >