This blog post on the O’Reilly site is a breath of fresh air. One thing we seem to be too good at in the Java World is making things too complicated. What’s more, we’ve a long history of it as well (think EJB 2.x implementation). While other HTTP based web frameworks are championing the simplicity approach (RoR, Grails etc), for some reason in the Java World we are going off in the other direction of making things impossibly complicated (JSF and Seam). Their promises are commendable, to enforce separation of concerns, enable maintainability etc, but the cost seems to be at a huge learning curve, and a negative impact on developers productivity.
At some point this is all going to come full circle and we’ll look back and thing ‘wow, what were we thinking?’, and I’m looking forward to that day coming sooner than later.