CUBA Platform

I have more than 10 years of experience in enterprise web software development and, as most of developers of the same sort, feel pragmatic about new stuff coming. So, by chance, I heard about CUBA platform from my friend, who was absolutely amazed and, even more, converted to CUBAN religion, since JavaOne. To help my friend and get him out of the sect I decided to have a look into the framework… So, there are two of us now!

That’s all lyrics, let me start with why this framework makes you highly-addicted to it, like cocaine for enterprise developers:

• Agile start and fast prototyping. In couple hours you have your first cuba application up and running, CRUD application even faster! Using the studio it’s just a piece of cake. It’s even hard to understand where the bound between Vaadin, Spring and ORM - very sleak! Best framework for the beginners, or if you have lot’s of newcomers and juniors.
• Reach functionality on both UI and middleware. CUBA has uniquely wide scope of the enterprise features that you get from the shelf, e.g. BPM and Reporting. As an example adding Reporting you get UI screens to manage reports in runtime. Adding charts you get more visual components to the visual UI designer along with features on backend.
• Architecturally CUBA is a standard 3 tier application using best practices of each used framework, amplifying them by tight integration. It gives you enterprise architecture, so all you have to do is filling it up with your logic.
• Highly manageable and customizable sourcecode. Having all this it still gives you access to any part of the platform sourcecode, which can be modified as per your needs.The worst part of such kind of frameworks to get stuck with something inside of it, but with CUBA I couldn’t find a case that can confound the platform. CUBA doesn’t limit you in use of external libraries. So, it’s not only best for beginners, but also good for Java experts.
• Documentation is absolutely clear and brilliant.

In comparison to other products I cannot even find a competitor. The only thing comes to my head is Oracle ADF, but CUBA wins the battle because of the above. I had really bad experience with ADF, and having completely opposite feelings about the platform.

Going through alternatives presented at AlternativeTo I can say that CUBA is real alternative to those competitors, but not visa versa.

E.g. mendix is good no-code framework, it cannot do what can be done with CUBA, but CUBA can do what mendix does by sourcecode auto-scaffolding, without putting a line of code. Vaadin doesn’t cover backend, so CUBA can solve Vaadin task, but Vaadin is only UI focused. OpenXava is low quality CRUD framework, so again CUBA has much wider use-area. And so on…

The only thing that I’m concerned about - community. But I believe it’s a matter of time, and in a couple of years CUBA will be on the very top of enterprise application development. And then I will be proud of myself that I was the first who noticed the potential among all AlternativeTo users and posted this review.

full featured enterprise stack, and seemingly of the most solid one in the segment.
Flexibility along with high level of abstraction, for business related apps