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What are the best Java web frameworks?

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9 Options Considered

Best Java web frameworks	Price	Platforms	Written in
-- Spring MVC	-	–	–
-- Play 2	-	–	–
-- Spring-boot	-	Cross-platform	Java
-- ActFramework	-	–	–
-- Vaadin	-	–	–

Spring MVC

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Top Pro

Spring MVC has a massive community

Being the oldest and most used JVM web framework, means that Spring MVC has a massive community of followers who are very helpful and have provided numerous tutorials and answers on SO. Spring even holds an annual conference called SpringOne. The Spring forums and SO are great places to ask and get help about anything Spring related. The website blog and newsletter keep developers informed on every news related with the framework. See More

Top Con

Complex and not newbie friendly

Spring MVC architecture although simple has a lot of layers and abstractions which can be hard to debug if problems arise. It is also highly dependant on the Spring core. It's an old and mature framework that has numerous amount of ways to extend and configure it – and this actually makes it fairly complex. See More

ArtisticTriton's Experience

Top Pro

Spring has an extensive ecosystem

It is based and is dependent on the Spring Framework, therefore it benefits from tools like for example Roo and Spring Tool Suite and many more tools included in the Spring Framework. All Maven dependencies are available in a public Maven repository. There are also 3rd-party solutions for Spring, such as MyEclipse which includes scaffolding capability for Spring MVC. See More

Top Con

Slow Prototyping

If you are looking to build a quick prototype fast and easy, Spring isn't going to help much. It's very large and quite hard to grasp if you are just beginning with it. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation that covers almost everything

The official documentation covers virtually everything. The official website also has a series of great tutorials in video and text formats. There are links to Github repositories for Spring sample applications and there are also a lot of third-party tutorials out there for the fact that Spring MVC is so widely used by many experienced developers. See More

Top Con

Updating and code maintenance can be a grueling task if you are a beginner

Updating your project is manageable if you’re already familiar with the framework and the project itself, but if you’re just diving in it can be a little overwhelming and hard. See More

Top Pro

Spring apps are highly scalable

Applications are meant to scale as the framework is used in large-scale applications worldwide. Components like EhCache are used to scale memory cache and it also contains components used for parallel processing. Batch enables processing of large volumes of records and job processing statistics. See More

Top Con

Lacking in UI development

While actually very good and with a very complete and rich feature set to develop and maintain code on the server side, it still doesn't provide any rich framework for building good user interfaces. See More

Play 2

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Rapid application development

All error checking and testing done in the browser only needs a page refresh to show the latest updates. This is huge, allowing the ability to code in real-time and make quick edits. Without it the develop would need to reboot/recompile the entire application to test with new data. See More

Top Con

Not backword-compatible

Applications that have been written in Play 1 will not be supported in Play 2 as the core of the framework was rewritten in Scala. This includes plugins that were working in Play 1 as well. See More

Top Pro

Very fast and easy to install, it is a revolutionary framework

Top Con

Becoming a Scala framework

As Play continues to develop and mature it seems as if it is becoming less of a Java framework as the core has been rebuilt in Scala. This may deter adopters. See More

Top Pro

Great resources

With some basic starting tutorials and a fleshed out documentation, there will be no need to go asking others for help, there should be enough for a developer to find a solution. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Top Pro

Asynchronous requests

Everything with Play has been built with asynchronous requests in mind. This will result in the application not blocking results while waiting on other operations. With this implemented your application can be developed with multiple threads in mind without worrying about hanging on one request before it completes another. See More

Top Pro

Supports Scala

Spring-boot

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Inherits all of Spring's strengths

Boot is just a thin configuration layer over Spring Framework, as such it inherits all the strengths of Spring. See More

Top Con

Lacking in UI development

While actually very good and with a very complete and rich feature set to develop and maintain code on the server side, it still doesn't provide any rich framework for building good user interfaces. See More

Specs

Platforms:Cross-platform

Written in:Java

Repository:https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot

Top Pro

Preconfigured starters

Top Pro

Fast prototyping

Spring boot is built for fast prototyping. See More

Top Pro

Kick down to Spring

ActFramework

Top Pro

Hot reload

You never restart while you're working on your Act application. Act's hot reload feature is fast and stable, it makes you feel like dealing with scripting language frameworks like Django or NodeJs. Watch this video and feel it. See More

Top Con

Very small community

As of February 2017, Act is a brand new framework (even though the project started at the end of 2014). Community is still forming. See More

Top Pro

Templating

Act's view architecture is very flexible and support using multiple view engines in your app. The default template engine is Rythm, a very developer friendly and powerful template engine. Act also support other templating solutions including freemarker, velocity, thymeleaf, and mustache via plugins. See More

Top Con

Documentation is still being written

Act's documentation is still under development. See More

Top Pro

Database access

Act's DB layer is extremely easy to use. It supports SQL databases (through ebean orm) and MongoDB (through morphia). Using multiple datasource can never be that easy with Act's DB layer. Go here for more information on this. See More

Top Con

Functional testing support still under development

Developers are still working on innovative functional testing support for Act. See More

Top Pro

Scalability

Act is built as a stateless framework. It supports horizontal scale. See More

Top Con

Incomplete microservice support

Although Act is built to be a great framework that supports microservice development, it lacks some of the key features at the moment, like sending requests to other microservices from within the app, service governance, and messaging handling. See More

Top Pro

Superb RESTful support

Act makes creating RESTful service a kids game. It features AdaptiveRecord (allows front end to drive the data structure), JSON response control (just declare the fields you want to present or hide) and RESTful URL routing with path variables. See More

Top Pro

Easy to deploy

ActFramework is not a servlet framework and there are no requirements on containers/app servers. It has a small package size (a helloworld distribution package size is less than 20 MB), a small memory feet print (a helloworld app heap usage is less than 20MB) and a fast boot up speed (a helloworld app starts in less than 3s). See More

Top Pro

Secure

Act is built as a secure product. It provides built-in CSRF/XSS prevention mechanism. And act-aaa makes it very easy to implement Authentication/Authorization/Auditing in your app. See More

Top Pro

Performance

There are two aspect of performance: how quick a developer can deliver a feature and how fast the app is running on the product server. Act is designed to delivery excellent result in both aspects. With unbeatable developing experience Act makes it very easy to release a feature; on the other side Act is very fast in runtime. Check out this 3rd party benchmark result. See More

Top Pro

Configuration for multiple environments

Act supports load configuration from a common dir and then overwriting it from a profile dir. Makes it very easy to manage configurations in different environment (e.g., dev, uat, sit, prod) Watch this video to see the innovative way Act delivers its configuration support. See More

Top Pro

Concise and expressiveness

Act does not require you to put Annotation when it is able to infer the intention from other parts of the code, i.e., you don't use @PathVariable or @RequestParam to tell Act the binding parameter name. And you don't need a ModelMap to bind variables to render argument names. Act has sophisticated byte class scanner to detect the variable names to do bindings automatically. See More

Top Pro

Complies to standards

Act's IoC is built on top of Genie, a fast dependency injection library that fully supports JSR330, and Act's validation solution is built on top of JSR303. Act is NOT an odd framework to most Java developers. Unlike Play1.x, ACT applications follow the standard maven project structure and it is very easy to integrate other Java libraries. See More

Top Pro

Fast and flexible routing

You can configure your routing in either Spring MVC/Jersey style with annotation or Play style with route table or a combination of both. Act's routing supports RESTful URL path variables, optionally validated with regular expressions. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Extremely easy to get projects up and running and to learn the framework. Transitioning from being a learner to having something that is secure and production ready is seamless. See More

Vaadin

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Easy to develop in

Vaadin has a 'design mode' which allows developers to drag and drop components into a canvas and then provide the logic for every component. There are also a lot of third party tutorials and guides which help with the initial learning curve. See More

Top Con

Weak scalability

Since Vaadin stores the UI state and logic in the server, this means that for every user interaction a request needs to be sent to the server and the client needs to wait so it can know how to react. This leads to higher traffic and load times. See More

Alejandro Duarte's Experience

As a Java Developer, using Vaadin is intuitive. Writing the front-end using only the Java Programming Language is the top feature of this framework. No need to deal with HTML or JavaScript. It's possible to use those too, but not necessary to build already quite complex web applications. See More

Top Pro

Compiles Java to JavaScript

Vaadin uses GWT to compile Java code into JavaScript. This means that developers using Vaadin can write both frontend and backend code in Java. See More

Top Pro

Easy to develop prototypes quickly

Vaadin has what is called the Vaadin Directory which is a repository of downloadable Vaadin components which can be easily used for development. To use something from the repository, you need to download the JAR file and add it to the project. See More

Top Pro

Top notch documentation

The book of Vaadin is a must have for every developer that uses Vaadin to make web apps. It is an excellent reference manual and all around a great tool for every Vaadin related need. You can find and download the pdf online or get it for free in almost any Vaadin sponsored conference. The online documentation is also very good. It has some tutorials and video guides. There is also a vibrant community which sorround Vaadin, for any problem you may have there is a big chance that someone has already asked and answered that question on StackOverflow or in the Vaadin forums. If not, it will probably be answered quickly if you ask it. See More

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

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Mature & stable (5+ years)

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Major backing (Google)

Apache Wicket

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Jersey

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Grails

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