Are there any new/updated Java web development frameworks to watch for?

Question

I know recently Spring 3.0 was released which brought about a nice new set of features and ease of web development with their MVC package. However are there any new frameworks on the horizon and/or new versions of other frameworks that a web developer should have their eyes on?

I heard about the Stripes framework, but it seems as though development has stopped. It also seems grails has a new release coming out as well which that looks like it is just an update to support the new features in the latest groovy release.

Answer 1

Look also at the Spring Roo and Play framework and I almost forgot about the Vaadin. There are often enough new/upgraded java web frameworks:)

Answer 2

Have a look at JSF with JSR-299 in the JEE6 standard. You can do quite a bit, and it is standardized.

Answer 3

Apache Wicket - light-weight component-based web application framework with strong separation of presentation and business logic.

Answer 4

Version 2.0 of the Google Web Toolkit was released back in December. Some of the new stuff:

• Development Mode: Previously you needed to use a "hosted mode" pseudo browser to quickly test your code (i.e. avoid a compile/deploy step). In 2.0, development mode allows on-the-fly running and debugging in any browser. This give big wins in speed and tooling (you can use Firebug etc.)
• Speed Tracer: A plugin for Chrome that gives you highly detailed performance profiling for your GWT (or any) client AJAX code.
• Compiler Optimizations: One of the great things about GWT is that the compiler is improved almost with every release meaning that you get a performance boost just by recompiling your code.
• Code Splitting: You put 'splits' in your code, allowing the browser to download just the code it needs to get started and download the rest when it's needed (great for apps with very large amounts of client code).
• Declarative User Interfaces: Define UIs in XML. Much less boilerplate code. XML<->Java integration via annotations.
• Layout Panels: Improved, standards-compliant, base panels.
• Bundled Resources: Image bundling from previous resources has been generified to allow any type of resource to be "bundled", reducing the number of requests the browser makes and allowing your app to load more quickly.

GWT works especially well with a good IDE (Eclipse or IntelliJ) since the IDE can take advantage of compile-time information from GWT, validating, on the fly your client code (since it's Java) and also things like CSS class name references and references between XML UI definitions and backing code.

Answer 5

Appfuse - Not really a framework, but it might be worth a look if you're looking for something to ease the initial ramp up effort on a JEE project. It provides a bunch of Maven 2 archetypes that will create a "ready to run" application based on any of:

• Struts 2
• JSF
• Tapestry 5
• Spring MVC

Struts 2 is also very much worth a look. Totally different animal to Struts.

Answer 6

I thought it was worth noting this as I just heard about the new release on java lobby. The lift framework. It is written in scala, which is java per say.