Blogging from JAOO

Sitting in on Alef's admittedly biased review of web frameworks
No silver bullets here (surprise), the answer is, "It depends" on:

• Size of Community / Support
  
• Migration Paths / Backward Compatibility record
• Documentation quality

After applying these filters we end up with Spring MVC, Spring WebFlow, GWT, JSF & ...yes Struts
and the way they handle:

• State Management - is HTTP Session an oxymoron?
  
• Navigation Handling
• Event Handling
• Templates and UI building

Results are summarized here:

Biased Opinions Here!!	Spring MVC, Struts	Spring WebFlow	GWT	JSF
State Management	None beside HTTP Session, best for almost stateless app.	Server based, can be in db	State is ALL client-side, RPC-style async service calls. State dependency mgmt. is hard	HTTP Session-based
Navigation Handling	limited, low-level req-resp	Excellent	?	Integrates well with Spring WebFlow
Event Handling	Req.-Resp. oriented, low-level	Excellent, requires session state	Elegant, all in Java	Very Good

UI Comments

• GWT: Little HTML left, not Dreamweavable. 100% AJAX-based
  
• JSP: HTML based, may be ugly. Good taglibs,
  
• Freemarker/Velocity: Good to build on Struts/JSP apps
  
• JSF: Higher-level than JSP. Good components available. AJAX with extension (Spring Faces, ICEFaces, MyFaces, Seam). Should use w/Facelets.
  
• Flex/OpenLaszlo/JavaFX: Interesting but very diffferent techniques
  

Recommendations

Stateless: Struts/SpringMVC with a templating engine
Stateful: GWT or JSF with Spring WebFlow