Re: Controller Servlets?

Nobody else has mentioned my favorite up-and-coming framework, RIFE 
(http://www.rifers.org/). It is a top-to-bottom replacement for JSP/EJB 
stacks. It is *very* different from most other Java web presentation 
layers, mostly in good, innovative ways. Supports continuations (which 
let you model your site flow as simple Java code rather than in reams of 
XML as in Spring Web Flow), bidirectional communication between views 
and controllers (its template language has no looping or conditional 
constructs; doesn't need 'em) and specify-in-one-place definitions of 
constraints on field values.

An additional project, RIFE/CRUD, gives you automatic generation of 
simple Web-based reporting and database editing pages, along the lines 
of Ruby on Rails in terms of developer complexity. All with tons of 
hooks everywhere so you can use your own code instead of the defaults if 
your app has special needs.

Definitely worth a look, if only for the novelty value. The only 
downside is that because it's so different, the learning curve is a bit 
steep, and because it's relatively unknown, there isn't the abundance of 
documentation of something like Struts.

My reaction to the source code of some of the demo web apps was, "That's 
*it?*" As in, "They did that with hardly any application code!"

-Steve