Unless you’re a newcomer to the Java world, you already know that nothing stands still with Java technology. There are a number of new web application frameworks coming onto the scene which take advantage of Java SE5.0 and EE5 features.
Stripes is a MVC framework which makes use of SE5.0 annotations – there is an overview here.
Gavin King also has an overview of the JBoss Seam webapp framework, which ties together JSF and EJB3.0. There is an overview on the Hibernate Blog here. Gavin’s example using Seam shows how simple it is to develop a webapp with Seam and implements the same webapp as the Stripes example as a direct comparison. The real benefits and main features offered by Seam however are in it’s ability to manage conversation state and integration with business processes, which are not demonstrated in this example.