There is an excellent blog post on choosing a web development framework/toolkit by Ilya Sterin. It captures very well most of the web app framework requirements and limitations we all face on a daily basis in our projects.
As mentioned in the write-up, most of the J2EE developers think, at one time or the other, about what features they really need from a web application framework and why there is no single framework that supports all those features.
If I have to pick top 5 features I look for in an ideal web application framework, they would be:
- Isolation from the domain layer so presentation and domain layers can evolve independently w/o (adversely) impacting each other.
- Simple and Easy Data binding between the Domain, Controller, and Presentation layers, so the developers don't have to write unnecessary and useless boiler plate code to convert the same data from a DO -> DTO -> Struts Action Form -> JSP/HMTL field to just select some data from a back-end data store anddisplay it on a web page.
- Support for data validation that works in all the layers w/o any additional coding.
- Support for AJAX functionality.
- Controller class methods can be exposed as RESTful Web Services w/o lot of extra coding or configuration.
The presentation layer classes should also be unit testable w/o having to deploy the web application into a container.
Ilya talks about the persistence concern as well. Unless the web application in question is a simple data driven application that can use a solution like RoR or Grails, I am not sure if persistence is really a concern from the web application side. In an ideal architecture, presentation layer should never access the persistence layer directly. It should always go thru the domain layer for the retrieval and modification of the data stored in the back-end data store. So, if the domain model and its boundaries are well defined and implemented, I don't worry too much about the persistence concern when I look for a web application framework.
I have been using Spring MVC in the recent projects. It supports all the items listed above except for the AJAX support. But I read that Spring WebFlow framework (which includes Spring JavaScript and integration with Dojo) has AJAX support, so that's good news for the developers who are using Spring.
I am also eagerly waiting to start using Spring 3 framework which makes it even easier to expose controller class methods as REST web services and also has Expression Language (EL) support which is another nice feature to have when working in the MVC part of an enterprise application.
