I recently started a new hobby project (it is still in stealth mode, so no details yet) and went through the exercise to really carefully think about what technology to use for it. On a very high level the requirements are fairly standard: Web UI, persistence layer, API focus, cross-platform, cloud-ready, continuous delivery, test automation, logging, user and role management, and all the other things.

Initially I was wondering about the programming language, but quickly settled for Java. I have reasonable experience with other languages, but Java is definitely where most of my knowledge lies these days. So much for the easy part, because the next question proved to be “slightly” more difficult to answer.

Looking at my requirements it was obvious that developing everything from the ground up would be nonsense. The world does not need yet another persistence framework and I would not see any tangible result for years to come, thus loosing interest too soon. So I started looking around and first went to Spring. There is a plethora of tutorials out there and they show impressive results really quickly. Java EE was not really on my screen then, probably because I still hear some former colleagues complain about J2EE 1.4 in the back of my mind. More importantly, though, my concern was more with agility (Spring) over standards (JEE). My perception with too many Java standards is that they never outgrow infancy, simply because they lack adoption in the real world. On the other hand Spring was created to solve real-world problems in the first place.

But then, when answering a colleague’s question about something totally different, I made the following statement:

I tend to avoid convenience layers, unless I am 100% certain that they can cope with all future requirements.

All to often I have seen that some first quick results were paid for later, when the framework proved not to be flexible enough (I call this the 4GL trap). So this cautioned myself and I more or less went back to the drawing board: What are the driving questions for technology selection?

• Requirements: At the beginning of any non-trivial software project the requirements are never understood in detail. So unless your project falls into a specific category, for which there is proven standard set of technology, you must keep your options open.
• Future proof: This is a bit like crystal ball gazing, but you can limit the risks. The chances are bigger that a tier-3 Apache project dies than an established (!) Java standard to disappear. And of course this means that any somewhat new and fancy piece must undergo extreme scrutiny before selecting it; and you better have a migration strategy, just in case.
• Body of knowledge: Sooner or later you will need help, because the documentation (you had checked what is available, right?) does not cover it. Having a wealth of information available, typically by means of your favorite search engine, will make all the difference. Of course proper commercial support from a vendor is also critical for non-hobby projects.
• Environment: Related to the last aspect is how the “landscape” surrounding your project looks like. This entails technology but even more importantly the organization which has evolved around that technology. The synergies from staying with what is established will often outweigh the benefits that something new might have when looked at in isolation.

On a strategic level these are the critical questions in my opinion. Yes, there are quite a few others, but they are more concerned with specifics.