How to improve productivity when developing Java EE based web applications

Question

I\'d like to know how you address the seemingly low productivity of Java EE-based web application development compared to other technology stacks (Seaside, Ruby on Rails, etc).<

Answer 1

Grails is a Java webapp framework very much modelled after Ruby on Rails, with similar principles (DRY, CoC) and productivity gains, but based on existing Java frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, several others).

I've been working on an exploratory project using Grails for a few weeks now (no previous experience in Grails or Groovy), and I'm quite impressed. There are a few rough edges - it's not as mature as RoR, but you can get results quickly and there's never the feeling that the framework is getting in your way.

Maybe it's best illustrated by this concrete example: I wanted to edit a 2D array of domain objects in a grid on a single webpage and found that the automatic mapping of the resulting HTML request data to the domain objects (provided by Spring MVC, I believe) had a bug that caused some data to be mapped to the wrong objects. I looked around on the web for an hour, but apparently nobody had encountered or solved the problem. Eventually I decided to forego the automatic mapping and do it "manually" - and then found that it took me no more than about 10 lines of code...