Are JSF/Seam/Spring suited for non-enterprise work? (website, not "web application")

Question

I'm starting work on a new website (sort of an e-commerce product comparison thing) and I'm trying to choose what technologies to build it on. I've ruled out PHP and I don't think I want to use Python or Ruby. I really like Java and Hibernate so I started looking into Java-based web technologies.

My problem is that all of the documentation and examples I've read can't seem to stop repeating the words "enterprise" and "web applications." I'm afraid of ending up with giant XML configuration files and business-oriented components while losing the ability to actually design the website. From what I've read of JSF, I like the idea of reusable components, but I still want the ability to customize individual pages. So my question is, are JSF/Seam/Spring well-suited for non-enterprise development? If not, what Java technologies are?

I have just started looking into JSF/Seam so please forgive me if this is an uninformed quesiton. Thanks in advance. :)

Answer 1

No problem. The JSF/Seam stack gives you all the customization you want, and it has very few XML files. In fact, it uses a lot of annotations to define entities and components, so you don't have to worry about writing tou much XML (it is one of the reason why Seam was invented).

JSF's standard components are rendered as simple HTML tags, while if you want to go AJAX and use Richfaces it will be a little harder to customize it, but nothing dramatic. I can assure you that for the view part, you can write whatever you want in your webpages.

Here's a nice reference of how the JSF tags are rendered.

For the model and DB part, the JPA framework gives you the ability to work with simple Java Objects, and sometimes using it in an "enterprise" context with legacy schema is even more difficult, so don't worry.

For a simple website you may safely skip the EJB part, this will help you writing a more cleaner project structure. You can package all your website in a simple .WAR file.

As for the "enterprise" word, I think it is more related to the fact that the Java EE framework gives you the feature you may need in an enterprise context, (i.e. EJBs), but you can avoid them. They don't bite.