Web Application Frameworks

Web Application Frameworks have become a recent obsession of mine. For the last seven or so years the framework I have most heavily utilized has been Apache Struts. Frameworks are generally supposed to ease your development and, at the same time, be a pleasure to work with. Lofty goals to be sure. And while Struts' MVC architecture was a revolutionary step in the right direction, it had more than it's share of shortcomings. So what is life after Struts like for a Java web developer?

Thankfully, there have been many products released (in various states of completion) that have attempted to reconcile Struts' shortcomings or perhaps revolutionize web development all over again. In the next few articles I'll attempt to review some of these frameworks by both reading about them (and I mean full book reads, not an hour in front of Google) and experimenting with building an app. Hopefully something better than Hello World.

Now this brings me to my other motivation for doing so. It seems to be a rite of initiation for Java web developers to build their own framework at some point or another. My own pet project is one that I call Phorce. However, mine is not in Java. It's in PHP. Feel free to check out the source if you're so inclined, but keep in mind it's a work in progress and will likely remain that way until I can at least gauge what the best direction is to take in this web framework arena.