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.

Gavin King: first impression (contrasting Spring guys)

Today I attended Red Hat's "Gavin King" event. While I have attended many Spring events in Sydney, this is my first time attending a Hibernate/JBoss/Red Hat event. And the impressions are quite different...

• First impression - clothes:
• The Spring guys are always well-suited and businessmen-like. They are often the centre of the crowd.
• Gavin's clothes were the most casual in the room. Before his presentation, I thought that fitted T-shirt wearing guy in trendy jeans was some skateboarding Ruby programmer who happened to want to know something in the Java world...
• Presentation style:
• The presentations by the Spring guys are always very professional, with the right level in technology details according to the nature of the event, the structure well organised, and seemingly well rehearsed.
• Gavin's presentation is, again, more casual, just like a technology chat. I don't know how much the other people in the audience know about Web Beans and Seam, but Gavin lost me a few times because I haven't been following what's happening in the JBoss world...
• Technology inclination:
• The Spring guys can be very pedantic (in a good way), always emphasising best practices, such as programming to interfaces, abstraction levels, separation of concerns, etc.
• Gavin is more pragmatic. Interfaces did not even make it to his slides. His Web Beans JSR recommends to make business interface optional for EJB 3.1 in Java EE 6. He reckons AOP is too complex for ordinary Java developers, there are only a handful of cross-cutting concerns, and EJB interceptors are enough to get the job done.
• Spring framework focuses on enterprise applications that are typically developed by financial institutions and usually involves lots of web services and enterprise application integration, and some of these enterprise applications may not even have a web tier.
• Web Beans JSR, JBoss Seam and Rich Faces, promoted by Gavin, are all mostly relevant to web-focused projects. Web Beans and JBoss Seam are particularly designed to ease development burden on entity management website with lots of CRUD operations, which make them competitors of (J)Ruby on Rails and Grails. I'll try to compare these frameworks in a later post. Enterprise applications seem off the target.
• The apparent weakness in the Spring framework are: no type-safety check in the application context until runtime, verbose XML configuration, no bean id (or name) namespaces and the statelessness of Spring-managed beans. However, the first two have been addressed by JavaConfig and XML namespace. Noticeably, JavaConfig also uses annotations, but only in the config class without polluting the service bean or the service client. The stateless singleton issue has also been tackled with 'scopes' and domain object dependency injection, which is enabled by Spring AOP.
• Gavin loves type-safety check in Java, so he hates the lack of type-safety check in Spring XML configuration, and he embraces annotation wholeheartedly. So he prefers Google Guice to Spring for dependency injection. In contrast to Spring's JavaConfig, Google Guice's annotations are used everywhere, in the service bean, in the service client or both. JBoss Seam introduces lots of annotations, and Web Beans JSR is to make many of these annotations into Java EE standard. I don't remember how many times Gavin showed the definition of an annotation in his slides today. Probably a dozen! And he still relies on XML configuration to override annotations. He classifies services beans according to deployment, such as one for production, one for stubbing in testing. So what will you do if you have two classes with the same service API, both used in production environment? My guess is you need to write a new annotation to differentiate them... Seems overuse of annotations, doesn't it?
• Hostility:
• Spring guys rarely publicly show their hostility towards JBoss, though in after session chats, they describe JBoss Seam as a "big hack", "annotation hell", "technologically inferior" and "would have been just another web framework were it not for Gavin King's fame".
• Gavin is more straight forward, rubbished Spring guys as "AOP nerds" during the session, and I wouldn't be surprised if he called Spring "XML hell". He deliberately omitted Spring when he enumerated the open source frameworks that have influenced Java EE.
• The audience:
• Spring events usually draw a huge audience. Many times, some people who came late had to stand in the back of the room for the whole session. They are almost always held in the evening.
• Today's Hibernate event was held in the morning with only a few dozen people attending. One-third of the seats were empty.

Anyway, I was pretty impressed by Gavin's demo of fast web project development with JBoss AS, JBoss Seam, Rich Faces and JBoss Tools. I'll definitely give it a try when I have the time...