Types of Java web applications

Question

As someone who's fairly new to Java-based web frameworks (currently learning Stripes), I was curious.. what kinds of web applications are you creating with them? I'm thinking it must be something more complicated than yet another blog engine or photo sharing app. (Or perhaps not?) I could see Stripes, Wicket or maybe Struts 2 being used for somewhat basic CRUD apps, but what about Spring MVC or JSF? I'm just trying to get a handle on how things differ compared to PHP-based web frameworks, which is where I spend most of my time but am looking to break away from.

Thanks much! -Sean

Answer 1

Where I work, we make extensive use of the JBoss RichFaces JSF library with Seam for the management interface to our application server, and the results are great.

Seam makes hooking up backing beans a doddle, and then you can do pretty much anything you want, from simple CRUD operations to invoking business methods on an EJB.

I haven't played with many PHP frameworks, but what little experience I have seems to indicate that those frameworks are very web-centric, rather than providing a UI layer for a larger application.

Answer 2

I use Spring, including its web MVC implementation. I think it works very well.

Answer 3

I use Seam with EJB3 and JSF RichFaces. It's mainly enterprise applications (HR, CRM applications).

The learning curve of developping Java (J2EE) applications can be hard if you come from a different world (like the typical LAMP stack) because I think it's stack which can be used for all difrent kind of purposes : web, service, webservices, data persistance in database, messaging, ...