

Ask HN: Technologies to use for a pet project - _em_

I have been out of side projects for a while and been only working at Java (server side). Hence I have no idea what new technology is out. So to learn new technology + build a pet project I need your suggestion.<p>The project I want to build requires<p>- A neat UI (I like Vaadin but not sure how good it is)<p>- Cross platform UI compatibility - Server Side to do transactions, printing on different machines, Roles management etc<p>Thanks.
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mindcrime
COBOL on COGS?
[http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM](http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM)

All joking aside, nobody can really tell you what tech to use. Everybody is
just going to reply with their personal favorite, if they reply at all. At the
end of the day, you just kinda have to pick something and give it a try.

My vote would be Groovy and Grails, with whatever cool javascript thing on the
front-end that you might want to play with, maybe Angular?

But some other "trendy" things that are popular these days include node.js,
Meteor, Scala/Play, Clojure and Go. Giving any of those a shot would probably
be a good use of your time.

~~~
_em_
finally someone replied. thanks for your input. I do want to use Angular.js
but i am not sure if it is compatible with vaadin or not.

Btw, why Groovy on Grails ? Any specific reason ? I want to learn something
which can land me a better job (if i want to cash that skill). So is GoG more
popular or RoR ?

~~~
mindcrime
_Btw, why Groovy on Grails ? Any specific reason ?_

No, that was me doing what I said everybody would do - recommending my
personal pet favorite. :-) I just happen to really like Grails as a framework
for developing web-apps and Groovy as a language. The combo hits a "sweet
spot" for me in terms of productivity and ease of use, and leverages a lot of
pre-existing knowledge of the Java / JVM ecosystem that I already had.

From a pure "market demand" standpoint, my guess is that RoR or even Node is
going to be more valuable than Grails, but I haven't empirically validated
that - it's just a hunch. In my case, I'm using Grails in the context of a
startup I founded, so it doesn't matter to me what the market is screaming for
- it just matters what I can use to Get Shit Done. :-)

