Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

Struts2 was presented as “ready for primetime” yesterday. I’ve been following the Struts2 progress for about a year, at first with enthusiasm, later on with increasing levels of despair.
Struts2 is heavily based of Webwork2, which in my opinion probably was the best Java MVC framework available about 2 years ago. However, Struts2 seems to be little else but a repackaging and rehashing of Webwork2. For the average user, there is very little new available at all.
This confirms my initial hunch after having been on the Struts2 dev-list for a couple of months earlier: there was very little progress, it all resembled a debate-club more than anything else. Endless discussions but very few decisions and very little progress.

This is most regretable, as the Webwork2 foundation is a great starting place for ideas, and no doubt the main devs on Struts2 are very smart and skilled. But that is simply not good enough if progress lags and little ever happens.

The state of the Java MVC world is in my opinion in disarray to say the least:

• Struts - Antiquated
• Struts2 - going places way too slowly
• JSF - Decent ideas, but antiquated from the get go (AJAX is an afterthought), heavy, high learning curve and hideously slow
• Spring MVC - Not too bad, but clearly not the main focus of the Spring team

There are a number of other MVC frameworks around that are reasonably good, but they all seem to have limited traction, and therefore are a slight risk to adopt. And of all the major ones, most seem to be either overengineered, evolving too slowly or in most cases both.

Java is at a definite risk to being doomed to being a back-end integration technology only, without a single, proper, widely-accepted MVC framework that isn’t hideously overengineered and heavy, this might actually happen.