(Sigh) What should we use? 

These are the only possible choices for our department.

JSF, Tapestry, Spring, Struts.

Every team uses (or will soon use) JAX-WS and Hibernate.

In my team we (or me only ) uses JSF/RichFaces and JAX-WS, other team uses Tapestry and Maven. 

JBoss Seam? Anyone? I'm thinking about it. (Seam and RichFaces) 

I'm willing to unlearn (or at least the other teams), just help us see the light.

And yes, it must (at least) support different containers (Websphere AS, Tomcat, GlassFish and JBoss)

Don't forget the IDE. (Eclipse, WAS, Netbeans) 

How about industry standards? I mean, the mostly "used" stuff. Does it matters? 

For me

• Many old applications are built on Struts and will be maintained using struts
• Many Servlet/JSP applications are being converted to Struts (1.2 or 2)
  
• Many applications will be built using Struts 1.2 and Struts 2
• Struts works well in Tomcat and Websphere. I haven't tried in other containers.

I  dunno if it's just me, but as I mature in the industry I tend to rely more on my design skills and improve on that rather than learning every new technology that comes.

 If I were to choose my technologies though maybe I would go for...

 Struts, JSF and JPA (I haven't used hibernate in real-world application so, that's why). It doesn't matter if I use Netbeans or Eclipse. I've used both and one doesn't seem differ much over the other. There are even more advanced features in netbeans that I haven't seen in Eclipse. JAX-WS is a piece of cake in Netbeans too! :)

In my current team we use

 RAD7(This is also eclipse), Struts, and EJB

 If your team is inexperienced in all the technologies that you mentione(JSF, Tapestry, Spring, Struts), I would recommend to just use Struts. There are a lot of info available over the internet and the javaranch forums would never cease to help you in times of need.

 How about communication between systems? Our team sometimes retrieve data from

good'ol legacy systems (Natural/Cobol) or sometimes just through web service. Other than using IBM HATS, can Struts handle these scenarios? 

I'm having a hard time making RichFaces work on WAS. Must I give this one up?

So many things, so little time.... 

Why did your team took Struts? What are the reasons? Is Struts the first framework used by your team? Any personal insights would do. 

And yes, JAX-WS in Netbeans is somewhat very, very easy, but we don't have that much time. Also, so that we could just focus on system designs and implementing user requirements rather than hacking the framework and making discoveries. I haven't tried RAD7.

Web Service thru Netbeans:

1. Our wrists are happy (iwas carpal tunnel).
2. More time sa aming love life, at sa iba pa.

Tnx man. I will give a solemn and divine 1 hour of my time (every night, kahit magtampo pa si gf. hehehe) in learning Struts. 

kirino:

 How about communication between systems? Our team sometimes retrieve data from

good'ol legacy systems (Natural/Cobol) or sometimes just through web service. Other than using IBM HATS, can Struts handle these scenarios? 

I'm having a hard time making RichFaces work on WAS. Must I give this one up

Haven't use WS in a while but let me give it a shot. This is how I think I would do it if I ever did it again.

You can provide an extra layer of abstraction between your Struts Action class and your Webservice lookup by using the Service Locator design pattern and Business Delegate pattern. Normally, this is used to lookup EJB components but same pattern can be applied in WS(I think).

WSLocator{ 

    WSStub doLookup("String wsEndPoint"){ 

       //do WS lookup stuff here 

    } 

} 

EmployeeService

   List<EmployeeDTO> searchByName(String name){       

       //From here, it doesn't matter if your data came from a database or Webservice, let's try taking it from a WS though 

      WSStub wsStub = new WSLocator().lookup("http://www.myws.com/someservice.aspx?wsdl");

      Document d = wsStub.searchByName(name);

     //create a List, do parsing here , return List

   }
 

}     

And call this in your Action class 

EmployeeService empService  = new EmployeeService();

List<EmployeeDTO> empService.searchByName("Lam"); //returns all that has an occurence of Lam in the String

//forward in JSP, iterate in List to display

kirino:

Why did your team took Struts? What are the reasons? Is Struts the first framework used by your team? Any personal insights would do. 

Uhhmmm... We didn't have a choice? Lolz! No, actually Struts is the only framework that most of us are used with. Yes, struts is the first framework used by my team. I'm the youngest, but  even the most experienced only had exposure with Struts. So we have no other choice but to use the tool that we are most familiar with, I think it's a pretty good decision on our part.

kirino:

And yes, JAX-WS in Netbeans is somewhat very, very easy, but we don't have that much time. Also, so that we could just focus on system designs and implementing user requirements rather than hacking the framework and making discoveries

I myself hate to do stuff like that but if you'd allow me to say, hacking, is part of every programmer's life. It's a lesson I've learned over the years. Remember that a brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work. :)

lamia:

I myself hate to do stuff like that but if you'd allow me to say, hacking, is part of every programmer's life. It's a lesson I've learned over the years. Remember that a brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work. :)

Yep man, true. So much to learn...

 OK now, tnx for the help. 

Back to work.

Look busy, the boss is coming....