Can anyone recommend a simple Java web-app framework

Question

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

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I found a really light weight Java web framework the other day.

It's called Jodd and gives you many of the basics you'd expect from Spring, but in a really light package that's <1MB.

http://jodd.org/

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The Stripes Framework is an excellent framework  The only configuration involved is pasting a few lines in your web xml    It s a very straight forward request based Java web framework

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A common property of Java Web-apps is that they usually use servlets which usually means the web server also runs Java  This contributes to the perceived complexity  IMHO  But you can build Java apps in the traditional Unix-style of  do one thing and do it well  without having performance suffer   You can also use SCGI  it is a lot simpler than FastCGI  I d try that first  But if it doesn t work out   How to write a FastCGI application in Java   Make an empty working directory and enter it Download the FastCGI devkit  wget --quiet --recursive --no-parent --accept java --no-directories --no-host-directories  http   www fastcgi com devkit java   mkdir -p com fastcgi mv   java com fastcgi Now you need to apply a tiny patch to the devkit  replace operator    with  lt   on line 175 or use this script to do it    echo -e  175c nif  count  lt   0    n  nw nn nq    ed -s com fastcgi FCGIInputStream java Create a test app  TinyFCGI java  source below  Compile everything  javac      java     will probably only work in zsh  Start the FastCGI server  java -DFCGI PORT 9884 TinyFCGI  leave it running in the background  Now set up e g  Apache to use the server    Using Apache 2 4  you can use mod proxy fcgi like this   Using Ubuntu  upgrade to Apache 2 4 using i e  this PPA Enable the mod  sudo a2enmod proxy fcgi Create  etc apache2 conf-enabled your site conf with the content below Restart Apache  sudo apache2ctl restart   Now you can access the webapp at http   localhost your site Benchmark results below   TinyFCGI java  import com fastcgi FCGIInterface  import java io    import static java lang System out   class TinyFCGI       public static void main  String args              int count   0          FCGIInterface fcgiinterface   new FCGIInterface            while fcgiinterface FCGIaccept    gt   0                count                out println  Content-type  text html n n                out println   lt html gt                 out println                    lt head gt  lt TITLE gt FastCGI-Hello Java stdio lt  TITLE gt  lt  head gt                 out println   lt body gt                 out println   lt H3 gt FastCGI-HelloJava stdio lt  H3 gt                 out println  request number     count                                    running on host                                    System getProperty  SERVER NAME                 out println   lt  body gt                 out println   lt  html gt                         your site conf   lt Location  your site gt    ProxyPass fcgi   localhost 9884   lt  Location gt    Benchmark results  wrk      wrk -t1 -c100 -r10000 http   localhost your site  Making 10000 requests to http   localhost your site   1 threads and 100 connections   Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max     - Stdev     Latency     3 58s    13 42s    1 06m    94 42      Req Sec     0 00      0 00     0 00    100 00    10000 requests in 1 42m  3 23MB read   Socket errors  connect 0  read 861  write 0  timeout 2763   Non-2xx or 3xx responses  71 Requests sec     117 03 Transfer sec      38 70KB   ab    ab -n 10000 -c 100 localhost 8800 your site Concurrency Level       100 Time taken for tests    12 640 seconds Complete requests       10000 Failed requests         0 Write errors            0 Total transferred       3180000 bytes HTML transferred        1640000 bytes Requests per second     791 11    sec   mean  Time per request        126 404  ms   mean  Time per request        1 264  ms   mean  across all concurrent requests  Transfer rate           245 68  Kbytes sec  received   siege    siege -r 10000 -c 100  http   localhost 8800 your site     SIEGE 2 70    Preparing 100 concurrent users for battle  The server is now under siege    C Lifting the server siege         done  Transactions               89547 hits Availability              100 00   Elapsed time              447 93 secs Data transferred           11 97 MB Response time               0 00 secs Transaction rate          199 91 trans sec Throughput              0 03 MB sec Concurrency                 0 56 Successful transactions        89547 Failed transactions                0 Longest transaction             0 08 Shortest transaction            0 00

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I like writing plain old servlets winstone servlet container   From there I bolt on templating  velocity  XSLT  etc  and DB access  hibernate  torque  etc  libraries as I need them rather than going in for an actual framework

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You can give JRapid a try  Using Domain Driven Design you define your application and it generates the full stack for your web app  It uses known open source frameworks and generates a very nice and ready to use UI

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Tapestry 5 can be setup very quickly using maven archetypes  See the Tapestry 5 tutorial  http   tapestry apache org tapestry5 tutorial1

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Grails is the way to go if you like to do the CRUD easily and create a quick prototype application  plays nice with Eclipse as well   Follow the  Build your first Grails application  tutorial here http   grails org Tutorials and you can be up and running your own application in less than an hour

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After many painful experiences with Struts  Tapestry 3 4  JSF  JBoss Seam  GWT I will stick with Wicket for now   Wicket Bench for Eclipse is handy but not 100  complete  still useful though   MyEclipse plugin for deploying to Tomcat is ace   No Maven just deploy once  changes are automatically copied to Tomcat   Magic   My suggestion  Wicket 1 4  MyEclipse  Subclipse  Wicket Bench  Tomcat 6   It will take an hour or so to setup but most of that will be downloading tomcat and the Eclipse plugins     Hint  Don t use the Wicket Bench libs  manually install Wicket 1 4 libs into project   This site took me about 2 hours to write http   ratearear co uk - don t go there from work    And this one is about 3 days work http   tnwdb com  Good luck   Tim

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Try this  http   skingston com SKWeb  It could do with some more features and improvements  but it is simple and it works

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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

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Try Apache Click  It is like Wicket  but much more productive and easy to learn

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I haven t used it by AppFuse is designed to facilitate the nasty setup that comes with Java Web Development

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Grails is written for Groovy  not Java  AppFuse merely reduces the setup time required to get any number of Webapp frameworks started  rather than promoting any one of them   I d suggest Spring MVC  After following the well-written tutorials  you ll have a simple  easy model auto-wired  with no XML configuration   into any view technology you like    Want to add a  delete  action to your list of customers  Just add a method named  delete  to your customer controller  and it s autowired to the URL  customers delete    Need to bind your request parameters onto an object  Just add an instance of the target object to your method  and Spring MVC will use reflection to bind your parameters  making writing your logic as easy as if the client passed a strongly-typed object to begin with   Sick of all the forced MVC division of labor  Just have your method return void  and write your response directly to the servlet s Writer  if that s your thing

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Also take a look at activeweb  its simple  lightweight and makes use of a few other things that i like  guice  maven      Its controllers can serve anything you want including json  Html  plain text  pdfs  images    You can make restful controllers and even use annotations to determine which http methods POST  GET       a controller method accepts

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Stripes   pretty good  a book on this has come out from pragmatic programmers   http   www pragprog com titles fdstr stripes  No XML  Requires java 1 5 or later   tapestry   have tried an old version 3 x  I m told that the current version 5 x is in Beta and pretty good   Stripes should be the better in terms of taking care of maven  no xml and wrapping your head around fast   BR   A

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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

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Have you tried DWR  http   directwebremoting org

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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   lt web-app gt       lt servlet gt           lt servlet-name gt spring-dispatcher lt  servlet-name gt           lt servlet-class gt org springframework web servlet DispatcherServlet lt  servlet-class gt       lt  servlet gt        lt servlet-mapping gt           lt servlet-name gt spring-dispatcher lt  servlet-name gt           lt url-pattern gt    lt  url-pattern gt       lt  servlet-mapping gt   lt  web-app gt    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    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  UTF-8   gt   lt 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  gt       lt context component-scan base-package  com acme foo    gt          lt mvc annotation-driven   gt    lt  beans gt    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   lt    taglib uri  http   www springframework org tags form  prefix  form   gt   lt form form commandName  person  gt   lt table gt       lt tr gt           lt td gt Id  lt  td gt           lt td gt  lt form input path  id    gt  lt  td gt       lt  tr gt       lt tr gt           lt td gt Name  lt  td gt           lt td gt  lt form input path  name    gt  lt  td gt       lt  tr gt       lt tr gt           lt td gt Surname  lt  td gt           lt td gt  lt form input path  surname    gt  lt  td gt       lt  tr gt       lt tr gt           lt td colspan  2  gt  lt input type  submit  value  Save Changes    gt  lt  td gt       lt  tr gt   lt  table gt   lt  form form gt    This is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to what Spring can do     Hope this helps

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Check out WaveMaker for building a quick  simple webapp   They have a browser based drag-and-drop designer for Dojo JavaScript widgets  and the backend is 100  Java

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I recommend Apache Click as well  If you pass the test of ten minutes I think that s the time you will take to read the Quick Start Guide  you won t come back   Regards   Gilberto

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The web4j tool markets itself as simple and easy  Some points about it    uses a single xml file  the web xml file required by all servlets  no dependency on Maven  or any other 3rd party tool jar  full stack  open source  BSD  smallest number of classes of any full stack java framework   SQL placed in plain text files  encourages use of immutable objects minimal toolset required  JSP JSTL  Java  SQL

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Oracle ADF http   www oracle com technology products jdev index html

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try Vaadin  Very simple and you ll be able to work the UI with ease as well  www vaadin com

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I would think to stick with JSP  servlets and JSTL After more than 12 years dealing with web frameworks in several companies I worked with  I always find my self go back to good old JSP  Yes there are some things you need to write yourself that some frameworks do automatically  But if you approach it correctly  and build some basic utils on top of your servlets  it gives the best flexibility and you can do what ever you want easily  I did not find real advantages to write in any of the frameworks  And I keep looking   Looking at all the answers above also means that there is no real one framework that is good and rules

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try Wavemaker http   wavemaker com Free  easy to use  The learning curve to build great-looking Java applications with WaveMaker isjust a few weeks

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Castleframework  http   maven castleframework org nexus content repositories releases   install using maven

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Have a look at Ninja Web Framework   It is a pure Java MVC framework in the tradition of Rails  It does not use any xml based configuration and has all you need to get started right away  Session management  Security management  html rendering  json rendering and parsing  xml rendering and parsing  It also features a built-in testing environment and is 100  compatible with traditional servlet containers   It uses Maven  though - but Maven used correctly makes software development super simple  It also allows you to use any Ide right away     By the way - developing Ninja is really productive - make changes to your code and see the results immediately   Check out  http   www ninjaframework org

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I really don t see what is the big deal with getting maven   eclipse to work  as long as you don t have to change the pom xml too much     Most frameworks that user maven have maven archetypes that can generate stub project   So basically the steps should be    Install maven Add M2 REPO class path variable to eclipse Generate project with the archetype Import project to eclipse   As for Wicket  there is no reason why you couldn t use it without maven  The nice thing about maven is that it takes care of all the dependencies so you don t have to  On the other hand  if the only thing you want to do is to prototype couple of pages than Wicket can be overkill  But  should your application grow  eventually  the benefits of Wicket would keep showing with each added form  link or page

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Your re searching for http   grails org   You code it with groovy  a dynamic language based upon Java and runs smoothly together with Java code  classes and libraries  The syntax is neither hard to learn nor far away from Java  Give it a try  it s some minutes to get a web site up and running  Just follow http   grails org Installation and http   grails org Quick Start   Greetz  GHad

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The correct answer IMO depends on two things  1  What is the purpose of the web application you want to write  You only told us that you want to write it fast  but not what you are actually trying to do  Eg  does it need a database  Is it some sort of business app  hint  maybe search for  scaffolding      or a game    or are you just experimenting with sthg  2  What frameworks are you most familiar with right now  What often takes most time is reading docs and figuring out how things  really  work  If you want it done quickly  stick to things you already know well

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I like Spring MVC  using 2 5 features there is very little XML involved

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Apache Wicket  Liftweb  require so much set-up  configuration   I disagree  I use Wicket for all my projects and never looked back  it doesn t take much to set up  not even an hour to set up a full environment to work with Wicket

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Recently i found the AribaWeb Framework which looks very promising  It offers good functionality  even AJAX   good documentation  written in Groovy Java and even includes a Tomcat-Server  Trying to get into Spring really made me mad

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

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