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Comparison between GWT and Spring MVC

I was wondering if someone who was experienced in both technologies could give an objective comparison between the two, assuming you were building a complex web application that would be both very rich in on the server and in the browser.
One problem with the older paradigm, for me, is testability of the Spring MVC layer. I find that there's a lot of bugs that can creep into your application due to untestable annotations. This model also slows development cycles because you have to restart the server to make changes to the annotations/controller code... which is something I personally find very annoying.
I also don't want to deal with the complexity of javascript. Working with and testing an application all in Java sounds appealing to me. I don't really want to master another language, and learn all of its quirks, weird design decisions, idiosyncracies and the full history of browser incompatibilities.
So for a complex application, would GWT offer a superior approach? Are there any serious limitations to this approach over Spring MVC, which would probably be more flexible although harder to work with? Are there any gotchas and road blocks that are common for building complex applications?
I would really appreciate a comparison between the two. Please keep in mind that I have no experience with GWT, but about 10+ years experience with Spring. Thank you!

The truth is that also GWT has a learning curve and also at least at the time I looked at it, two years ago, you're not doing much with the basic controls, you need external libraries and that means more learning.
After trying to learn GWT without much success, I opted for a webservice plus either jQuery or ExtJS, which also gives a very clean separation of the roles. I sat down and learnt JavaScript, it wasn't easy but it was immensely more fun than using GWT.
As for browser compatibility, once you use a modern library, you'll have very few of them. My code works in all browsers without too many problems, including IE 6. Also when I am too busy, I write the services only and outsource the JavaScript interface part, which allows increased productivity.
Anyway, this is fairly subjective, another person fluent with GWT, can have an opposite point of view of mine. I will anyway reject the following reasons:
ease of debugging. Not true anymore: it's very easy to debug JavaScript with FireBug, plus there won't be any business logic in JavaScript, only services call and display.
browser compatibility. There are very few quirks to remember, the most common one is that IE doesn't accept trailing commas in lists, which is anyway not in the standard, but Firefox tolerates them. Any modern JavaScript library will take care of compatibility for you.
Speed. To start with I will state that JavaScript is very fast for any reasonable computation within the browser. What is slower is DOM manipulation and of course anything involving the network, like AJAX calls. Your page will perform just right if you don't do design mistakes, like stuffing too many things or other problems that can arise when adding many elements directly to the DOM, instead of building your structure and then attaching it all at once.
As far as I can think now, the only valid reason is, I already know Java, I don't want to study another language.
As for your comment on Spring MVC. I am using Spring MVC and I don't feel the pain of restarting the server. The whole point of Spring is that everything should be easy to work with outside the container! In the Spring controllers I've very minimal code that just call the underlying services. What I need to unit test well are the services.
The controllers have very few code to test, I could just call them and test them within JUnit, but, at least for now, my approach is having a simple external test done through a web page with jQuery calls that check their response (it's not unit test, it's an integration test, but I feel there is a very little value to unit test a controller, if it's written properly).

I am using GWT for more than a year now in a complex project (200 KLOC for the whole project), and I recommend you to give GWT a try.
In my opinion GWT is quite easy to learn, there are really good tutorials about how one should use this technology.
The advantage of using GWT is that one can build nice, fast, maintainable web apps, without knowing very little about browsers or javascript. You can also debug your client side code with a Java debugger and in complex apps this is huge.
Although GWT offers the possibility to properly unit test the client side code, this requires a good understanding of GWT's MVP paradigm and careful planning. If you mess up your code (which is not that hard, because GWT gives you total freedom) then you are going to end up losing this feature, but this is your fault, not GWT's.

It took me a couple of months to learn Spring well enough to create fairly basice MVC apps. It took me about a month to master GWT. (It could be that it was easier because I had already worked with Android for three years and it works similar. It even has the exact same unobvious solutions to some of its problems.) So for me, GWT was definitely much easier to learn than Spring.

Which is the easy way to build login/registration/admin area type website in java

I am php programmer but i am learning java now. i have finished the core java and build small projects using jdbc , mysql gui etc.
Now my boss wants to build the website where user will collect points and they can shop based upon points left.
But the initial phase will be only the logs/registration/admin area etc.
Now i have two options
1)Do in php
2)DO in java
I really want to do in java thats why i was learning it. Now now the project came early.
I wanted to learn spring , spring mvc , hibernate etc , design patterns but now i can't spend time first to learn.
i want to ask that what will be good solution to go at it. Initially was thinking of doing the website in JSP.Is that ok
O i am thinking of using Wicket and not using hibernate, is wicket enough to build ecommerce site. or i need anything else as well
I know only core java , what should i do

PHP development is very action/template-oriented, AFAIK. Wicket is a component-based framework, that heavily applies object-orientation concepts, and that may take some time to grasp. If you don't have much experience with OO, and your deadlines are tight, maybe you'll prefer an action-framework (Struts2, SpringMVC), which is far better than raw JSP. But, if you have some time to spend, and the will to learn, Wicket is definitely a great framework!
Spring is also nice, and while dependency injection is not something you see often in PHP, it's simple enough (Spring is well documented, its reference doc is actually useful, and you'll find many tutorials and examples on the Internet), and it's definitely worth learning.
Hibernate is a very good framework for persistence, but if all you know is plain SQL/JDBC, it takes some time to master it to the point that you don't get frustrated with mapping, and lazy-loading errors. Again, try it if you have some time to spare and the will to learn.
Wicket+Spring+Hibernate is a really nice combo, I use them a lot. It may or may not be the best stack for your case. As everything in IT, it depends on the context. But I think they are very sound technologies, individually or combined.

Consider Struts 2. It is both effective and there is a good size community here if you have any questions. I don't know wicket, but any web framework is better than straight JSP.
Hibernate is nice but since you have a lot on your plate you should probably stick with straight JDBC for now. Spring is also very nice, it is easy to integrate spring DI with struts2 (so easy as a matter of fact I would recommend you just start that way).

One of the fastest ways to get a Java webapp up and running is to use Play Framework.

a large scale java project solution

I would like to start up a project from scratch. I am a java developer for years. I did even write my own mvc framework some time ago for fun. Now I am working in a company using in-house framework - which i think is a total loss of time and money. I respect the idea of teaming up with different skilled people for a large scale project. The separation of the project is very important; Graphics guys, front end developers, software architectures, software developers, database experts, etc. I cannot risk to use a scripting language like php.
Lately, I am researching java technologies for a large scale project in every aspects. What I mean by that, for the front layer I come across with very famous technologies.
Spring
MyFaces
Tapestry
Google Web Toolkit
Cocoon
Velocity
Every one of them states that it is the simplest, the fastest, the latest technology and whatsoever. Of course only one them can hold the truth. I need a front end technology for fast implementation for ajax, customer/administrator security, themes, templates, internationalization, caching static pages, clustering and a support of ejb. It should also have IDE support, community support, rich documentation and online tutorials. Still I have no experience of those frameworks which to choose from. Maybe there is even better one? And most importantly, I cannot risk to start up on a technology which has development limitations. Is there any suggestions for this layer?
For the business layer, I am sure of EJB and JPA. I do even considering a web service for facade of this layer for interoperability purposes for future extensions. However, I have no idea about securing that layer (it could be applied on its web service level) which is still a problem for me. For the application server I am considering GlassFish.
And for the last question is what IDE should be picked for development. Regarding all the technologies, which are going to be used, an IDE should help me in every step, either doing the configuration for me or helping me configuring with its ready wizards. I suppose the IDE will have proper plugins for to be used technologies.
I know that I want too much, however I have a hope for a combination of technologies which will help me saving time and money in my future plans.
I ll be really glad to hear your responses, experiences for a bigger picture.
edited: There is no ultimate answer, I know that. I am just taking advice. Any answer is appreciated.

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and give concrete recommendations, since I think the question can be answered.
I'll simply recommend my stack.
My stack is Stripes for the front end, and Glassfish/Java EE 5 on the back end.
Stripes is a simple Action (or MVC, whatever floats your boat), that has a small, but robust and vocal community. It has tight integration with JPA (through a plug in), a very good, and current, printer book on the topic as well as excellent reference documentation. It's main rendering tech is JSP with JSP Tags and EL.
It is not a component framework like JSF/MyFaces, so it's implementation is simpler, and it's lifecycle is simpler. It works very well with Ajax.
The key factor around Stripes, since it's based on the HTTP request cycle is that it does most of the grunge work for you, yet is very lightweight. It's easy to pick up and understand. Creating a basic Stripes app is a couple lines in the web.xml and two jars (one of which is log4j). If you can think in HTTP, then Stripes is a good fit for you.
On the back end I would simply stick with EJB and GlassFish. Java EE 6 and GFv3 are out have been out for sometime. It offers a lot of new features over Java EE 5, and GlassFish offers most any web service tech you would like to use. Java EE 6 and Spring are pretty much equal on a bullet point by bullet point basis, and since you were looking at GF, you may as well use EJB since it's there and integrated in the box. If you were using Tomcat, then Spring might be a good choice.
And, that's it. That's all you need (I dunno what you wanted Velocity for, you can add that trivially if you like, but I wouldn't use it for pages, personally, modern JSP is much better IMHO).
Glassfish will secure your web services, you can use Java EE security with your web apps, you can share logic between the back end EJBs and your web app and web services. It all works out of the box with 15 minutes of configuration to get Stripes running.
I use NetBeans, but all of the other IDEs work as well. NetBeans is nice because it come integrated with Glassfish. One less thing to configure. Download it, fire it up, and it works.
There's a Stripes plugin for NetBeans, that I don't use. I don't see a need. Once you add your few lines to your web.xml that you cut and paste from the web site, you never see Stripes again. From there, it's all simple annotations.
Unless you have a crushing need for all of the complexity and learning curve of a component framework, it doesn't get any better than Stripes, and GF w/Java EE 6 has everything you need in the box.
So, in summary: Stripes distro from www.stripesframework.org, NetBeans download from netbeans.org, and stripersist from stripes-stuff.sourceforge.net. It's a rock solid foundation that will go wherever you want to take it.
Come on by to the Stripes IRC on freenode at #stripes, and we'll answer any question you have (or hit the mailing list).

Well, first of all, your question is not good. Every technology has it's bright sides and dark sides. To choose some specific technology - you need experience in all of them to estimate which problems can emerge with your project. Given your definition: fast implementation for ajax, customer/administrator security, themes, templates, internationalization, caching static pages, clustering and a support of ejb - 90% of frameworks support all of it either directly or using some plugins.
Moreover, various technologies are better optimized for various needs. You can't have a all-in-one-super-framework that is flawless and does everything the best way possible. Given that the framework is highly scalable and fast (example: Spring and/or Portlets) will make it hard to configure for some small tasks.
So the only thing I can recommend is to google "Java Web Framework Comparison" and hope for the best.
As about IDE, I can see only 2 choices: IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse. Again, there is no clear winner so yet again google is the only source of information you can get.
Added:
Talking about frameworks again, complex projects use several of them at once taking the best parts of each to aid with the specific project needs. But to do that effectively - you need to be a guru in all of the mixed technologies.

There is almost no way that someone can actually answer this question for you. In terms of frontend technology, one of the frameworks will work for you and others won't. It all depends on which one makes sense to you. My suggestion would be to try them all out and pick the ones that you feel the most comfortable with.
With that being said, I do have a few suggestions. First, don't limit yourself to using Java. If it were me, I would use Ruby on Rails running on jRuby as the frontend as it is the fastest framework for developing web applications that I have used. By running it on jRuby, it allows you to hook into Java and let java and its libraries do all the heavy lifting on the back end. I would stay away from web services and implement things using ReST.
In terms of an IDE, definitely go with IntelliJ IDEA. It may take a little bit to get used to, but it is definitely the fastest IDE on the market. However, both Eclipse and Netbeans are also very good for Java and a tad cheaper.
Once again, the answer is, "it depends".

All of the above projects started off with simple ideas. As they gained traction, they have all added neighboring features which are useful to some but not necessarily all. In other words, you will have to do deep analysis to pick the perfect framework.
You are not going to find a perfect match unless you just happen to be of like mind as the dozens of people working on the particular framework, assuming that all those minds were ever in perfect agreement. The only "perfect" fit is the one you write yourself, and even then you find it's not perfect as you are limited in time and effort on developing the framework; after all, you DO have a program to write, and the framework development time competes with the program development time.
As far as IDEs go, there's differences in taste and style. I tend to gravitate between the old standbys of Netbeans and Eclipse, and my next IDE to play with will be IntelliJ Idea. The thing to remember is that most people commit to one IDE and then defame the rest, so you really can't get a good comparison. IDEs take too much time to really learn for a person to give a honest unbiased opinion. A good candidate IDE "X" will be the worst in some eyes and be the best in others.

Given how the other answers look, I would say the biggest remaining factor is the learning curve for you and your team. Given your description of the separation of roles, your primary concern should be picking an overarching framework, such as Spring. From there, your database guys can pick whatever they want for data persistence (hibernate, jdbc, whatever) and your gui guys can pick whatever they want for their front-end (tapestry, jsf, etc.).
The primary concern I would have with such a distinct separation of roles would be the communication on the team. Make sure that their is a high degree of open communication, especially when discussing interface design, as those will be integral in the success or failure of your project (especially if you pick Spring).
As far as IDEs go, it's personal preference. The two mentioned in the other posts (Eclipse and IntelliJ) are the two I hear the most about, with Eclipse being my standard IDE for the last 4 or 5 years. I'm not familiar with IntelliJ, but I know that Eclipse has plug-ins to support Spring, Hibernate, and a host of other frameworks and ORM solutions. It also has plug-ins to support other languages as well, such as Ruby and PHP.

"I did even write my own mvc framework some time ago for fun" - at the end of the day it may happen that you will regret that you did not stay with it. In fact the technology that is better than currently "famous" most probably is the one that will be famous a little bit later, not now. Half of your list is already "famous" as obsolete.

Pointers to user profile frameworks in Java

I'm looking for pointers to something that I may be overlooking (or maybe something that Jivebot hasn't yet written for me). What I want is a pre-rolled Java framework for managing user accounts that takes care of most of the common tasks associated with such.
For instance, Jfacets is a good approach to automagic view controlling, but you still have to roll the view code. I wonder if there's a framework that has pre-rolled components for inputting/storing common user profile information, sessioning, and possibly things like inter-account communication, connecting to common social APIs, exposing an API, etc. (basically some/all of the common tasks that a user profile-based app would want). It can be quick and dirty, this is a prototype app at the moment.
I do know that user profiles are a very app-specific arena, and that I may just have to build something up, just thought I'd check first.
In the absence of a pre-rolled solution, I like what I see in Woko after an initial glance (http://woko.wiki.sourceforge.net/). The preconfigured stack includes Hibernate, Spring, Compass, JFacets, Stripes, and Maven and an API framework. I may just need to build the prototype up leveraging this as much as possible.
Thanks

So, it looks like user profiles are just too situation specific for any framework. Shame, because there's a lot of basic functionality that could be served by a basic framework.
On the "solution" front, I'm attending the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland, Or. and recently saw topics on Scala (Two word description: Java scripting) and a framework built on that called Lift (three word description: CodeIgniter for Java). In short, these technologies rock my world.
Anyone looking for robust web frameworks should check out Lift. Scala allows people who love programming in Python and Ruby to use Java's JVM without the cost, with a lot of syntactic elegance (Scala is somewhat more intuitive to my Python-centric mind than Clojure). Lift is a MVC-style framework built on Scala which is just plain beautiful- and frighteningly easy to use.
Normal disclaimers, but the upshot is that it will take significantly less time to build an app-specific solution for a scalable Java app using these technologies than trying to find a user profile framework to use.

Java for the web

I posted this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/418597/java-and-net-for-php-programmer and the answers I was given didn't really help me out.
I read a few of the tutorials at sun.
The basic syntax I understand. The thing I don't understand and really need to (because I think my company is going to tell me start working with this) is to learn how to work with java for the web. I am a php programmer and I did some asp.net c# a few months ago. I am really not understanding how to work with java on the web.
I installed netbeans.
When I start a web project I also get asked what frameworks I want.
I don't know any java frameworks (I do know about spring but never really worked with it).
Is there no simple tutorial on how to do some java for the web??? I never had these much problems when I was first introduced to php :(
Someone help me out, or at least point me in a good direction.

You may find this question helpful.
All you really need to know is HTML, Java, and JSPs.
Creating dynamic content is very easy using JSPs and Java. You also need a webserver like Tomcat or Glass Fish.
As far as the back end Java code goes, there is no difference between that and a desktop application. The only thing that you are changing is the user interface. One of the biggest challenges with switching to a web interface is the fact that it is stateless by design.

The frameworks make web programming easier, they're not required. You can write web applications using plain old servlets and JSPs (with a web application container like Tomcat or JBoss) or even do all the HTTP I/O yourself (obviously that's pointless with Tomcat, etc, around).
A framework like Spring with Hibernate, etc, is similar to frameworks in PHP like CakePHP, they make development easier, they enforce sensible patterns (MVC) upon the programmer, the abstract code that is always going to be done the same way for this type of application. Yes, they limit your choices and abilities, and restrict the actions you can take, to varying degrees. Some are far more heavyweight than others. But there's a lot of choice in the Java world which is a strength, but you just have to spend time evaluating them, and picking one based upon your capabilities.
Take struts and tiles. You can simply use Struts as an MVC system and avoid all of the utility JSP tags it provides. It would take you a short time to rewrite the functionality you end up using yourself, but that's time you don't have, and then there's debugging, and specific domain knowledge and experience that you can't account for.

Are you familiar with MVC? There are multiple frameworks in Java that implement it. Struts is one of the more popular. It may help to start using Struts and work through a tutorial.
This tutorial is a good one that also will introduce you to spring.
This tutorial deals with struts in netbeans

By technical side, you can start downloading Tomcat and code the exercises and documentation.
By "architectural" sie, you code in Java the business logic, that is all the components that take the parameter by communication client-server (request), manipulate this and use this for create the result.
this result is give to communication server-client (response) and it appear, with presentation layer (JSP, etc) in the web page.
The explication is very preciseless and not very "orthodoxe", I know.
It's matter that you understand.

The programming model that is (in most cases) used when writing a Java web application is actually a subset of J2EE. Not a rocket science, but there's a need to know at least bits of it.
Get yourself familiar with concept of J2EE Web Container, J2EE Web application, it's descriptor (web.xml), Servlets (which are, in fact the basic "building stones" of any J2EE webapp) and, of course, JSPs.
Sun has many nice tutorials on their's web pages. Googling any of the above terms with "site:sun.com" usually brings good results (e.g. this one about the concept of Servlets: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/articles/tutorial/ ).
I'd also forget about web frameworks first, and start with the J2EE stuff, then MVC as a design pattern. After that, go into the web frameworks. Use of a framework is usually of a great help, but even when using one, you still need to know the basics.

Since you're using NetBeans, start with the tuturials they have on their site.
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/docs/web/quickstart-webapps.html
Go through the simple tutorials on the site before you start going into the details on any frameworks.
Java webapps are pretty simple. You have your Java classes (.java) that handle your business logic and your .jsp files that handle the presentation. Try and keep them seperate. You also want to familiarize yourself with the JSTL tags and el (expression language) syntax