Java Enterprise Best Practices

Choose the Right Servlet Framework

When writing web applications, it’s good to remember that servlets are an enabling technology. This is easy to forget because in the early days, the Servlet API was all we had for server-side Java web programming. If the Servlet API didn’t include something, we had to build it ourselves. It was a little like the Old West, where times were tough and real programmers wrote servlets by hand. Specs weren’t written yet. Heck, we felt lucky just to have out.println( ).

These days, times have changed. The crowds have come, and with them we see a multitude of servlet-based technologies designed to make web application development easier and more effective. The first area of innovation has been happening at the presentation layer. Technologies such as JavaServer Pages (JSP), WebMacro, and Velocity give us more productive alternatives to the vast fields of out.println( ) that came before. These technologies make it easier than ever before to quickly develop, deploy, and maintain dynamic web content. You can find a full discussion of these and other templating technologies in my book Java Servlet Programming, Second Edition (O’Reilly).

Today, we’re seeing a new area of innovation happening below the presentation layer, at the framework level (see Figure 3-1). These new frameworks provide a solid scaffolding against which new web applications can be built, moving from building pages quickly to building full applications quickly. Frameworks take the best designs ...