First [early] impressions of EGL

I have heard so much banter on the list on the CGI-Dev vs EGL vs PHP vs [insert your favorite development language/tool here] debate that I decided to "take the tour". I am in Jon Sayles webinar (2 hours a day over 10 days) to get some EGL training so I can evaluate the merits of the tools. I really don't *want* to learn another set of tools but this is one of those situations where there is enough buzz that I have to know what it is about, if only to know what I don't like. Having just gone through the lengthy exercise of get Rails to run comfortably on i, I felt that another few weeks of "learning curve" wouldn't kill me.

As background I have:
1. WDSc experience developing RPG application (reluctant but now enthusiastic user).
2. MyEclipse developing java servlets using Freemarker as the templating tool and writing the model/controller java code from scratch.
3. Visual studio 2005 for developing VB.Net apps both stand alone and fat client
4. Zend Studio for PHP development
5. Aptana Studio for Rails (JRuby) development (RadRails plugin).
6. Squeak for some Smalltalk development

Most of my HTML is developed from within MyEclipse IDE. I used to use Dreamweaver but I found most of the resultant HTML difficult to do quick hacks on with Notepad (lazy).

So those are my biases. I also spend the greatest portion of my time (60% lately) in Java.

My initial impression is positive. The development environment is familiar because of the Eclipse base and although the project structure seems a bit too J2EE-ish (a least my experience with it) , navigating a project is pretty easy. I still have much to learn so I don't "naturally" know where to find stuff but after two days the whole thing isn't that daunting. You'd probably find the curve steeper if you haven't used Eclipse or something like Visual Studio. The strengths, so far, are the drag and drop creation of the "view" (.jsp) part of the application, the linking of several pages together and I am loving the database access tools and wizards: The objects created are easy to understand and manipulate and easy to associate with the jsp pages. The Java code that is generated is actually quite readable, although I have no plans for direct hacks since the GUI tool seems more than adequate to manipulate the code.

Still very early in the curve. I haven't weighed in on the whole debate so far because, well, I don't know that much about EGL and most of my input would be opinion, rather than based on experience. I hope to be able to respond with some knowledge after I have finished the whole web based workshop in a few weeks.

Not saying I am drinking the koolaid or not. Just spending my time learning this stuff rather than debating.

Pete Helgren