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

Well, I'm not really a Java guy, so I can't say much, except for... JSF

We tried to use it for some time and it was a disaster. Almots all basics steps had to be passed with lots of pain, no documentation, no examples, no community knowledge. We used then one plugin for Eclipse (Exadel Studio), we had a look at a few other JSF frameworks, they were all incompatible and poorly documented. As a matter of fact, of all those we tried, only Sun framework (forgot its name, based on NetBeans) could create a new JSF project even compilable out of the box. The rest required many days of configuration of apache and other things, which for an unexperienced person is a real challenge (though I managed it).

Our team spent a few months on something which was done later in just a few weeks with ASP.NET. People were both inexperienced in JSF and ASP.NET.

If JSF ecosystem is still that bad as it was in 2007, I would recommend avoiding it altogether, productivity is out of the question anyway. Maybe stick with JSP or something that is time-proved and well developed?