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Easiest web development method from Java perspective?

I have always been a front-end Java programmer, sometimes had to do C# on .NET but for the most part, Java is probably all I know about.
Just currently I have to do a small-scale website doing extremely simple thing and I really don't know where to start. My HTML skill is probably as good as I am with XML on Android, which is fair to say far less complicated than the HTML source code modern website have. I have almost no experience with PHP either, and no strong background on building or managing a database.
Is there some sort of technology that builds fully working website using mainly Java? It may have other languages I have to familiarize with but for the most part, I'd like to have little learning curve. For the backend I'm very sure I'm going to use cloud server services like Azure or Parse.
This is a very special project of me so I can't let anyone code it rather than me and myself only. Thank you and have a good day.

Use Servlets and JSPs for web development it's a start point and then java webservices as you already know XML.

I suggest you to build all your front-end using the following set of technologies: HTML5, AngularJS, JQuery, javascript, bootstrap. Your backend could exchange json with the front-end. The Bootstrap is the base for all your website and you could get a free template from the web itself, which would severely reduce your hard work at web designing. You would need just to adapt the links and calls, and the AngularJS would handle the controller and other stuffs ( have a chance to learn about ). Some JQuery components, or even AngularJS components would enhance your system usability and combined with javascript would bring most of hard work to front-end. I had the chance do start a system from zero and this is what I did, and now I have an AngularJS app working together with java by having java on the backend ( spring, hibernate, etc ) receiving and providing json data. At github you find some angularjs seed examples which you could use in your app and, again, save time and effort.

My apologies in advance, My answer is a bit broader in scope,
The Best Development Model for developing any website regardless of your language choice in Azure App Service is to take advantage two powerful features offered by Azure App Service, the Continuous Deployment feature and Deployment slots.
Start your website on a git repository and you may have node modules or bower packages, but on build your git will crunch it down to a working website with proper gulp files. Check out this blog to understand the process.
Once you have the git repo working for a simple website, your development process becomes much smoother. You can commit a change and Continuous deployment will automatically start a deployment for you to get your latest bits into your web app.. Check this blog for more details on Continuous Deployment.
You can use deployment slots to stage your changes and swap to maintain multiple versions of your web app on the cloud to easily build a production level application that has a last known good state. Check this blog for more details on Deployment slots.
The two features are the most used features while developing, deploying and servicing any project I work and I have found them very useful to understand them and use them in all their glory.
I am not a Java developer, but from the your question I can see you are looking to start on web development, the quick and powerful way (purely subjective here :D) is to use Asp.Net 5 with Angular 2 Beta. Here is an end to end tutorial on how to setup a development environment. Asp.Net 5 should be friendly toward Java developers as it is very light weight and simple to use and works great with vscode and visual studio community edition.
Let me know if the long answer helped, if you need a pure java environment that should be possible too :).

Websockets Server in Java (or PHP)

I could need your experience according server implementations for the currently evolving Websockets in HTML5. We want to use this technology for a project using common webbrowsers on the client site. What we now need is a webserver that feeds our requirements. These are:
written in Java or PHP since these are the languages which currently are used and mastered by all the programmers in the project. Since it seems that there are no promising PHP implementations yet, I tend to concentrate on the Java site.
as fast as possible. We don't expect too heavy usage in production but we need to be able to synch two browsers on independent host in nearly real-time.
easy expandable. We will need to implement our own protocol on top of the websockets so we would like the most possible flexibility.
easy to use, well documented and actively developed. Since we have to come to a first running implementation rather quickly and since I expect some changes in the developing people during the time, it would be great if it's not to hard to get into the server programming.
I already had a look on some servers/frameworks which look promising, e.g. Jetty, Netty and jWebSocket. I also found some older discussions of this topic. However, I would be glad about some current experiences or recommendations of those of you who already have used Java (or PHP) to work with Websockets. Is there some implementation which is especially well-fitting or one that we absolutely shouldn't use?
Edit:
For clarity: When I speak of implementing our own protocol on top of Websockets I mean having some kind of plugin mechanism so that we can use a Websocket to send XML-messages to the server and then use a plugin to interpret them into some server actions as we like. I guess every server implementation also supports this but it would be good if it was not too difficult to write such plugins.

I don't have any experience with PHP so I'll give you my opinion for the Java (and python side).
For Java:
You have your very common and safe choice of Tomcat. It's one of the most actively developed servers, its open source, lots of support/help from its very large community, from what I've read (but not tested) it can be fairly scalable and it also has a very mature console to monitor different metrics for your website.
You also have other choices such as Caucho's Resin, who have a very small yet smart team who actively develop their webserver. Their new heartbeat service allows a good degree of scalability (again from what I've read).
And then you also have Google's appengine which is all about scalability. Their API (for both, the server and client side) has started to focus on realtime web applications so it's a bit easier to for creating high performance web applications without having to worry about the server related optimization that you often have to make with other servers. They have APIs for creating "channels" between the server and client side for very realtime applications. The AppEngine team also has a new MapReduce API for analyzing data quickly/efficiently. For these reasons and the personal opinion that they are pioneering new web technologies/standards, I'm personally been leaning towards AppEngine. It's free if you're keeping cpu/data usuage low but if you need full scale deployment it does start to get pricey so do research. If your project is more for fun/school, its free quotas are enough and all its development tools/APIs are free so it's perfect.
For Python:
I'm more Java than Python, but Python is definitely a great language and very very very easy to learn. And the reason I'm recommending Python for consideration here is because AppEngine also allows developers the choice of Python. The author/creater of the Python language is now on the AppEngine team so, even though the Python and Java APIs are pretty much exactly the same, they sometimes have new/better APIs for Python. For example, I think the datastore API offered with Python is a bit easier and optimized for the Google datastore. Also, since you'd be using python, you can use Django with AppEngine.
The second choice that I've recently become aware of is the tornado web server which was developed by FriendFeed and then bought and used by Facebook. It's also actively developed. But the reason I bring this up is that Tornado's focus, much like AppEngine's, is high web application performance and scalability. I have no experience with it but I've become interested in its technology simply because no one can contest that Facebook requires a very high performance/scalable web server.
Some last thoughts:
In general you'll find that it isn't very difficult to build your own protocol on top of the APIs provided from most web servers (even Asp.NET MVC). But from what I've been able to test around with AppEngine, it really focuses on being flexible on what kind of protocol is build on top of it. To me, its pretty much just feels like a RPC server which which works on top of HTTP. And that becomes even more apparent if you use Python just because of some of the language constructs.

Migrating a 2-tier Java application to...?

We currently have a 2-tier Java Swing application sitting on top of MS SQL Server 2005. All the business logic is in the database. The client is quite old (and not very friendly), and for reasons of performance and scalability, we've already started porting some services to a middle tier in Java.
However, we still have a number of short and long term goals:
Pick a technology stack for a new front-end
This isn't easy - I can see everything from a web app at one end of the continuum to a traditional desktop app at the other being viable choices. The current front-end isn't really complex (mostly form-based), so I can see web/AJAX fitting, but it's an area where we don't know what we don't know.
Stacks on my list are:
Eclipse RCP, Netbeans RCP
Flex/Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX
Pure Javascript frontends (Sprout Core, Javascript MVC, ...)
Java-based Web frameworks (Wicket, JSF, ...)
Find a way of making the current application perform acceptably in a remote situation
We have some clients who resale our app to smaller clients and need to be able to remotely deploy it. Due to the 2-tier nature of the current architecture this leads to terrible performance (for example, calling a stored procedure that returns 18 result sets). We've used a Citrix solution in the past, but no-one likes that approach. Tunneling JDBC through port 80 also sounds like a bad idea. I was starting to wonder if there's anything that could use a X-Windows like approach to remote just the GUI part.

To simplify development and leverage your experience in Swing consider using Vaadin for your frontend. It is a Java framework for building modern web applications that look great, and perform well. All the code is written in Java and looks very similar to Swing.
As far as overall application architecture I would advise multi-tier, service oriented architecture. The best way to do it is by using Spring framework with Hibernate for database access.

If you want to easily redeploy your application, for an update, security reasons, etc. and if you want your application to be it to be accessed remotely, you should really consider a web based front end.
Plus, this way, only one app, your web app, will handle connection to the database, so no JDBC tunneling or whatever.
Concerning the best framework, it depends on your team knowledge, the way your application will be used (more or less javascript), etc.

We've just gone through a very similar evaluation process as we're migrating a legacy application.
For us the biggest deciding factor in what front-end framework to use was the prior knowledge of the development team. We wanted something that everybody would be comfortable with immediately. We had a couple of the senior developers that have worked with X or Y, but the framework that everybody knew was Swing.
In the end we decided on the NetBeans platform using RESTful webservice to communicate with an EE server.
As a bonus you can get your NetBeans platform application to deploy as a Java WebStart application, which means you get the benefit of not having to worry about individual installations.

If the frontend is mostly form-based, I would stay away from Flex. Flex is great for some applications (I'm using it for a canvas based application), but the form components of Flex has some usability issues. They just don't work like you expect from todays web. (like missing support for mousewheel, typing in dropdownlist only take first character into account etc.)

Assuming that you are going to force all your clients to install a new middle tier, I can't think of an argument against making it a Java web app. As already mentioned you have the benefit of controlling all access into your platform over HTTP, which allows easy resale, just with firewall configuration. There's no reason you can't make use of Javascript within a web front end, you may be interested in DWR, which allows you to interact directly with Java objects via Javascript. I've used this before to add some simple Ajax interaction to a Spring MVC webapp.
The reasons I like this approach, you're already migrating code into Java middle tier, so
Already imposing Java server hardware cost on clients, hosting app server / web server is comparable
Already have Java expertise, can be leveraged with DWR
Can use as much/little Javascript as appropriate (I've used DWR with IE6, Firefox 3, Chrome)
I think you're right to be wary of pushing too much functionality to the client, I'd go for as thin a client as possible. The only reason I'd look at the first two stack choices would be if you have some developer expertise in a particular area, and not Java webapp/Javascript.

I'd suggest to create a short list of candidate frameworks and create a small test application with all of them. This way you will get a sense of good and bad aspects from all of them and also get a picture what the community activity and documentation is like for each project (there is a lot of variance on those).If you end up doing this I hope you'll include Vaadin in your short list, I think it would fit you very well. If you have any questions just come over to our forums and we'll help you to get started.

Beginning Google App Engine Java - Which Framework to start with?

I am new to both JAVA and Google App Engine. My Interest in Java stems from its compiled nature, speed and widespread enterprise use, whereas my interest in app engine is mainly because of it's initial free nature along with scalalbility.
I have been through Google's Getting Started and FAQ, I have modified the guestbook app and generally played around with the datastore, creating a simple entry system for use at work, using database schemas similar to the guestbook app. I come from a hackish PHP background, and most of my app consists of JSP pages with HTML and scriptlets mixed, with classes for the datastore stuff.
I have read about JSP, JSTL & JSF(not much) and also the basics of appengine, it's limitations,strengths and quotas. I also understand that my current approach is flawed. I have searched for JAVA frameworks and found one too many. I have been through the Will it play in App Engine list, but I do no half of the stuff mentioned there. I understand that webapp(used in the overview) is a framework and so is GWT. I understand I have to learn core java first.
What framework should I begin with which is easy to use and also robust/secure enough to handle a financial app? The framework should also have value, if I were to host it in a pure J2EE environment independent of App Engine.
I would appreciate a word on study resources too. Currently I see this book on amazon as a resource but are there cheaper alternatives like a library with a monthly subscription from where I can peruse similar books.(and I know that Google is a real good resource.)
Are there any developers here who have apps hosted on appengine java and would like to share their personal experience of appengine java with a beginner?
I use Eclipse with the Google App Engine plugin to develop and upload my apps.

Regardless of what you want to do in Java you absolutely need to learn your way around the core language and the basic part of the runtime library.
The Java Tutorial covers this and is pretty straightforward.
Then you need to learn the Servlet API which underlies almost all Java-based web solutions today. Sun puts this in the full Java EE tutorial (which is a bit heavy) so have a look at this quick overview.
When you have gotten so far, you have a much better idea of what your basic toolbox is, and can give information allowing to give better advice on what technologies you should choose.
Sorry for the steep learning curve, but the view on top is fantastic.

If you aren't doing Java development currently, and/or haven't done much web development. I definitely wouldn't complicate things with adding frameworks.
What are you trying to accomplish that you need a framework for outside of the Google App Engine stack?
I've been developing with Java for years and only started using Spring with my Google App Engine app because I need a good security and authentication option. I wish I didn't have to use it since it's a rather steep learning curve.
You should be able to do most everything you need to for a simple app with JSP. If done correctly you can even do it in MVC if you wish.

On top of everything else people have recommended, I suggest you take a look at Objectify, a much simpler datastore API than the JDO/JPA ones included in the App Engine SDK.
This is, of course, after you've gotten familiar with the core of Java first.

Django or RoR like common Java or ASP web-frameworks

I am a fan of big agile software development methodology and love to develop web pages using Django and RoR. However, it creates a big constrain as there are really very few Django or RoR developers to hire.
For a new web project, we will be hiring developers and even though I would love to see these employees using such tools, sadly it will be either impossible to find related developers or even if we find them(virtually impossible for my country), we will be very dependant on them.
Also time is a big constrain thus considering "finding clever programmers and letting them learn these technologies" is not an option.
Under these conditions, I would like to hear common Java or .Net alternatives and why would you suggest them.
I can think of Spring, Hibernate, Stripes, Struts and Wicket for Java
Also Microsoft ASP.NET MVC looks really promising.
EDIT: I Need to mention that I won't be an active developer for this project but act as a manager.
Regards

If you want Java, Spring, and Hibernate with RoR-like "convention over coding", why not try Grails? It's based on Java, Groovy, Spring, and Hibernate. You'll be able to get a lift similar to RoR for web-based CRUD apps.

ASP.NET MVC is quite promising. It "borrows" a lot of its ideas from the Rails framework and community. I am a ASP.NET (MVC)/C# developer primarily, but had the opportunity of doing some Rails development before I moved from traditional ASP.NET WebForms to ASP.NET MVC. After doing development in Rails, I found it quite easy to make the transition to ASP.NET MVC.
Also, I haven't done any web development in Java, but since there are so many web frameworks to choose from, you may not find enough Java developers to build out and ramp up a team quickly enough, all with experience in the same Java web framework.

web4j might be what you're asking for. However, it is not that popular and your developers will have to learn the framework too. I think it will be faster than learning a new language though.
I believe that building a framework in java or .Net that resembles RoR or DJango is very difficult. This because the languages designs are so different. Also because Java and .Net target the enterprise market, which usually requires more robustness.

Agile development really has nothing to do with what languages or tools you're using. Of course, certain tools and methodologies make it easier (MVC tends to make it easier), but my suggestions would be as such:
Go with ASP.NET MVC. It borrows a lot of the good stuff from Rails, and provides some powerful tools that will make developing ASP very friendly to everyone involved.
Use an agile planning tool. I suggest Skinnyboard, as it allows you to do true agile planning.
Don't fret about the tech! Agile is how you manage the project, not the technologies that the project is using.

You're asking how to develop webapps fast with enterprise frameworks vs RoR.
My initial answer is you can't expect to develop webapps in .NET/(Spring/Hiberbnate) as you would for RoR. Lots more setup, lots more to learn and understand at a deeper level. Lots of configuration.
I don't see php here. I assume a lot more people use php. Why not look at php and symfony. Symfony derives its fundamentals from RoR.
If none of the above fit the bill I'd go for Spring/Hibernate/MySQL/Tomcat. We developed multiple largescale web apps with that stack in an agile Scrum/Sprint scenerio

For Java, VRaptor has a controller+view implementation similar to rails actionpack, and uses a DI Container based on Spring. Also has some nice integration with Hibernate/JPA, XML/JSON serialization using XStream, helpers for Integration Tests and a pretty nice documentation.

Haven't tried it myself, but Play! Framework for Java looks very promising. RESTful architecture, MVC and a neat admin interface (like Django) built in.

A platform based on Seam/Hibernate/JBoss sounds exactly like what you're looking for.
Seam is the web framework, Hibernate is the object relational model, and JBoss is the server container.
After coming up with a database schema, you can even use seam-gen to reverse engineer it and do your "scaffolding."
It's flexible, enterprise level, and free to work with.
Furthermore, Java developers are everywhere.