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.

You can implement RESTful Web Services in Java using the JAX-RS framework.

JAX-RS is part of the JavaEE 6 platform. But if you are not using a JavaEE 6 application server, you can use the reference implementation Jersey and embed it in any web application server.

However, it’s quite awkward to produce JSON output from Jersey.

Jersey has some support for producing JSON via JAXB, but to get the NATURAL encoding (which you probably want) you need JAXB 2.1. And that can be problematic since JAXB 2.0 is bundled with JavaSE 6 and with some application servers (such as WebLogic). Overriding that with a later version of JAXB can be really difficult. Using JAXB is also a bit clumsy if you only want to produce JSON.

I’m currently developing my first AJAX based web application. The goal is to have a pure AJAX application, i.e. never reload the entire page, use only background XMLHTTPRequest to contact the server.

My observations so far is that it is possible to do most of the application logic I need. But the performance of Javascript execution in the browser is a big obstacle. The application is centered around a list of data items in a scrollable area. The list is loaded as preformatted XHTML with an AJAX request and then some Javascript is used to decorate it with event handlers. I would like to display up to 1000 items at once, but I quickly realized that this wasn’t possible. The Javascript loop triggered the timeout in the browser after about five seconds. This timeout does not count waiting for the server to deliver the response, it only counts the client Javascript code to process the response. This timeout is reasonable, it’s clearly not acceptable for the user to wait over five seconds for the browser to process the server response (in addition to wait for the server and network to deliver the response). After limiting to 100 item, it works.