Don't stray too far from well supported language, tool and platform combinations

I have been doing a lot of customer work lately using Java EE 6 and Glassfish. Fairly nice development environment even if Java EE 6 is heavy on ceremony (but better than J2EE).

Just for fun today I took small play apps I had written in Rails and Clojure + Compojure and shoe-horned them to run on Glassfish. Interesting exercise, but unless there is an overwhelming need to create a custom deployment setup, it is so much better to go with the flow and stick with well crafted and mature setups like

• Java and Java EE 6

• Clojure + Compojure running with embedded Jetty behind nginx for serving static assets

• Rails app hosted on Heroku

• Web apps written in either Java or Python hosted on AppEngin using the supported frameworks

• etc.

I must admit that I enjoy hacking not only code but also deployment schemes - enjoy it too much sometimes. Sometimes it is worthwhile, most often not.