Java Web Framework Changes...

For some time now I have been having major frustrations deciding on a Java Web framework to replace Struts. In the past I have evaluated some alternatives such as some component based Web frameworks such as Tapestry and a little at JSF. Both of these solutions are powerful but can be quite complex. While I understand the benefits of component based frameworks I am not sure that either of these frameworks are absolutely necessary for our environment. So in between Tapestry and Struts there are over 50 other web frameworks that are slight derivatives of Struts, promising frameworks like Wicket with little doco, or strangely named frameworks with little substance. So of these frameworks only two came into consideration - Spring MVC and WebWork. Both of these frameworks are not component based but address the shortcomings of Struts. One of my biggest grips with Struts is having to implement ActionForm objects and dealing with the Action class with it's hard to unit test methods. Just binding Strings to ActionForms and translating those String to my model objects is a huge coding overhead. Spring MVC and WebWork allieviate this problem and add much more value. Both have support for continuations, AJAX, good documentation, Spring integration for actions, Velocity/Freemarker support, and community support. We currently use Spring in our middle tier and Hibernate for our persistence layer. However, we chose WebWork because of the simple configuration, easy to configure interceptors, pluggable view handlers, programmable continuations, and support for other popular frameworks like Spring. Choosing a Java web framework is very difficult and you have to accept that there is no single best choice. That is probably why there are too many already available and more will keep coming until someone gets it right. So our web tier for the forseeable future will now consist of WebWork 2.2 + Freemarker + SiteMesh.