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

Some basic rules:

1. Kick out the appserver - a HUGE win in turnaround and quality. Keep a web container if you have to, but configure everything in Spring and/or Hibernate so the web.xml is minimal.

2. Test everything, which you can now do because of step 1 (no deploy-time XMLs or code generation needed: everything is configured in the development already).

3. Use Wicket to implement your web tier - nobody needs JSP any more; Wicket is 10 times more productive plus easy to test (see step 2).

4. Use SCRUM and agile development methodologies

The result is Java productivity as high as 4GLs allow - we at Atomikos have several migration projects we did like this. Because we migrated from 4GL platforms to Java/Java EE, we could compare the estimates in both.

Also see this blog post: http://blog.atomikos.com/?p=87

HTH

Guy