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

I've used Jboss Seam for the past couple of years and find it to be very productive way to develop in Java EE (utilising EJB3, Hibernate, Facelets). I also do the odd bit of PHP coding on the side and can honestly say that I'm more productive with Seam (although that's probably also an indication of my PHP skills.)

For me a couple of the highlights would be:

• Hot deploy of code (an absolute must-have)
• DRY with Facelets
• Annotation based configuration
• Extensive drop-in components (especially ajax4jsf)
• IDE Support from Jboss Tools

There are tools in the IDE and from the command line to build skeleton code in a similar way to RoR.