I've been recommended the Click framework from Apache. But I can't find any forums talking about benchmark, reviews, advantages, disavantages, usefulness, ease of implementation, etc.
I've been asked to use it to develop a web site, but I'm completly in the dark about its strengths and weaknesses.
And its damn name isn't helping !! Click ? Hey Apache ! Call your next framework "the" just for fun. I dare you.
So can anyone comment on his experience with Click ?
It's an apache incubator project but that does not mean the project is not stable, rather it reflects that it is in transition to the Apache project model.
Click is Apache's version of a component based web framework equivalent to JSF (other component base Java Frameworks are Tapestry and Wicket)
Click is rated at Ohloh
There is an official blog and some Wikipedia references: Framework Comparision and info page
What I personally like about the Click framework is that it is fairly close to HTML/HTTP and the Servlet API. There is no huge abstraction to get familiar with. You have a Page class, a Form class, ... If you need to preserve state across invocations you put it in the session or you pass it through the URL... This makes it easy to start using it. It is also straightforward to control the HTML pages being generated. It may sound like it is a very basic framework but the simplicity is actually one of it greatest strengths.
Other frameworks (e.g. Seam) are more suitedr to create a very large web application with lots of reusable components and complicated pageflows but the learning curve is much steeper. So for me Click works well for small to medium sized websites.