When you know which type of web application you are to develop, it’s time to have a look at some possible choices.

I have tried to categorize some modern and popular web application frameworks in Java.

Simple server driven MVC page based

This category contains the traditional frameworks used for developing web applications with purely server driven application logic. They are based on complete HTML pages and uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

If you are to develop a web application, there are a lot if frameworks to choose between.

I assume that the web application by its nature needs to have bi-directional communication between the web browser and the server during the execution, initial downloading of resources is not enough. I also assume that the available technologies are HTML, CSS and JavaScript/AJAX; no Flash, Java applets, ActiveX, Silverlight or other browser plug-ins are used.