So a bunch of books arrived on various Java frameworks. I had a conversation on the #java channel on freenode and most people pan struts. They say that struts 1.0 was awful, and struts 2.0 is just about usable, but pretty bad. I asked what they thought of JSF (Java Server Faces) and they said that it's kind like asp.net in java, not really a ringing endorsement. The guy didn't like Spring MVC at all, described it as a train wreck. They liked wicket though, and didn't have much comment on stripes. The user in question had already validated himself by describing the very subtle difference between passing by reference, and passing a reference by value, which is a very subtle but important detail in Java, amongst other pearls of wisdom, so he wasn't a complete n00b. The drunk guy spouting aspersions about java.io.File suggested Groovy, but I haven't really looked at that yet, as you know, this was the drunk guy who was trying to re-invent Spring, and couldn't deal with cross platform file access. One of the Groovy guys is on the Java podcast I listen to (Java Posse), so I suppose that speaks well of it.

A guy who I worked with on another project had suggested stripes, and this is a person I have a lot of respect for, so I bought the stripes book, which is in beta, so I got a PDF, and they'll send me a book when it's ready. The upside was that I had a PDF to work with straight away, so I've spent the last couple of days reading on Stripes. It's pretty cool so far. It does a lot of sensible things very sensibly :). I like the general principle of convention over configuration, which is something Stripes in hot on.

I am guessing the wicket book will probably arrive Tuesday or Wednesday, and I'll have a look at that. I have a couple of projects that I need to do in the short term time frame so I need to make a decision pretty soon.