Can anyone recommend a simple Java web-app framework? [closed]

I'm trying to get started on what I'm hoping will be a relatively quick web application in Java, yet most of the frameworks I've tried (Apache Wicket, Liftweb) require so much set-up, configuration, and trying to wrap my head around Maven while getting the whole thing to play nice with Eclipse, that I spent the whole weekend just trying to get to the point where I write my first line of code!

Can anyone recommend a simple Java webapp framework that doesn't involve Maven, hideously complicated directory structures, or countless XML files that must be manually edited?

Solution 1:

Haven't tried it myself, but I think

http://www.playframework.org/

has a lot of potential...

coming from php and classic asp, it's the first java web framework that sounds promising to me....

Edit by original question asker - 2011-06-09

Just wanted to provide an update.

I went with Play and it was exactly what I asked for. It requires very little configuration, and just works out of the box. It is unusual in that it eschews some common Java best-practices in favor of keeping things as simple as possible.

In particular, it makes heavy use of static methods, and even does some introspection on the names of variables passed to methods, something not supported by the Java reflection API.

Play's attitude is that its first goal is being a useful web framework, and sticking to common Java best-practices and idioms is secondary to that. This approach makes sense to me, but Java purists may not like it, and would be better-off with Apache Wicket.

In summary, if you want to build a web-app with convenience and simplicity comparable to a framework like Ruby on Rails, but in Java and with the benefit of Java's tooling (eg. Eclipse), then Play Framework is a great choice.

Solution 2:

(Updated for Spring 3.0)

I go with Spring MVC as well.

You need to download Spring from here

To configure your web-app to use Spring add the following servlet to your web.xml

<web-app>
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>spring-dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>spring-dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

You then need to create your Spring config file /WEB-INF/spring-dispatcher-servlet.xml

Your first version of this file can be as simple as:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
   xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans   http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc     http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">

   <context:component-scan base-package="com.acme.foo" />    
   <mvc:annotation-driven />

</beans>

Spring will then automatically detect classes annotated with @Controller

A simple controller is then:

package com.acme.foo;

import java.util.logging.Logger;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.ui.ModelMap;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ModelAttribute;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/person")
public class PersonController {

    Logger logger = Logger.getAnonymousLogger();

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String setupForm(ModelMap model) {
        model.addAttribute("person", new Person());
        return "details.jsp";
    }

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public String processForm(@ModelAttribute("person") Person person) {
        logger.info(person.getId());
        logger.info(person.getName());
        logger.info(person.getSurname());
        return "success.jsp";
   }
}

And the details.jsp

<%@ taglib uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags/form" prefix="form"%>
<form:form commandName="person">
<table>
    <tr>
        <td>Id:</td>
        <td><form:input path="id" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Name:</td>
        <td><form:input path="name" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Surname:</td>
        <td><form:input path="surname" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td colspan="2"><input type="submit" value="Save Changes" /></td>
    </tr>
</table>
</form:form>

This is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to what Spring can do...

Hope this helps.

Solution 3:

I am really grooving to Stripes. Total setup includes some cut-and-paste XML into your app's web.xml, and then you're off. No configuration is required, since Stripes is a convention-over-configuration framework. Overriding the default behavior is accomplished via Java 1.5 annotations. Documentation is great. I spent about 1-2 hours reading the tutorial and setting up my first app.

I can't do an in-depth comparison to Struts or Spring-MVC yet, since I haven't built a full-scale in it yet (as I have in Struts), but it looks like it would scale to that level of architecture quite well.