Which is the hottest Java web framework that people want to learn?

A recent post on The "Break it Down" Blog, Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework? Or Maybe Not Java? has attracted lots of attention, including that of Java Web Frameworks Guru Matt Raible.

The author excluded Tapestry and Stripes because of the high noise from the common usage of these terms.

Some readers, including myself, commented that the high search rate may reflect that some frameworks, like JSF, especially JSF 1.1, are so bad that people encounter problems all the time and have to rely on Google to search for solutions.

In order to find out how people really like to learn about those frameworks mentioned in the post, I tweaked the search terms a bit by adding the word "tutorial", as I reckon anyone who wants to learn a web technology is likely to search for a tutorial on that technology, only if they speak English...

And here are the result.

Comparing JSF, Struts 2, Spring MVC / Spring Webflow, JBoss Seam and Apache Wicket:

As we can see, JSF is much more popular than all other Java web frameworks and is very popular in India, Hong Kong, Czech, Singapore and the Philippines. Struts 2 ranked second, slightly better than Spring MVC and Seam. And Wicket didn't even have enough search volume to rank.

Then I compared Struts 2, Spring MVC / Spring Webflow, JBoss Seam, Tapestry and Grails:

Basically, there is little search volume for tutorials on Grails, Tapestry and Stripes (not shown in this image). This is probably an indication that the official website for these frameworks have good documentation and tutorials, where JSF is only a specification and you have to find tutorials elsewhere.

Here the interesting observation is: Struts 2 is very popular in India and Brazil; Seam is far more popular in Austria, Spring MVC is especially popular in London and Grails has been taken up quite well in Germany. And surprsingly, even Australia has more search volumes for these frameworks than the United States.

Finally, I compared Ruby on Rails, Adobe Flex, JSF, Struts 2 and Spring MVC / Spring Webflow:

Hmmm, Ruby on Rails, Adobe Flex and JSF are popular to the same level. However, the popularity of JSF has been on a plateau for the past few years and has begun to decline. Ruby on Rails also starts to show signs of decline, while Flex is rising sharply.

And Ruby on Rails are very popular in San Francisco and San Jose, CA, the Philippines and Sweden. And Flex is rather popular in Brazil and Europe.

Grails 1.0 is Out!

Grails 1.0 was finally released yesterday!
To quote from the official website: "The Search Is Over!"
After a long and exciting wait, Grails, the response to Ruby on Rails (RoR) from the Java land, has reached maturity.
It adopts "Convention over Configuration" (CoC), which has been made popular by RoR.
It's built on top of solid frameworks, such as Spring, Hibernate & Sitemesh, allowing developers to quickly develop web application with a focus on CRUD operations on database.
It also has a healthy plugin system to allow contributors to develope plugins, such as Acegi plugin.
When developing with Grails, you program in Groovy, a powerful scripting language that runs seamlessly on the JVM. It has all the powers that Ruby has and maybe more.
Enjoy the journey to Grails! I'm sure I will.