On Monday November 12, 2007, Matt Raible wrote a entry to his blog titled Comparing Web Frameworks: Time for a Change?. In this entry Matt talks about his initial presentation of Web Frameworks at ApacheCon in 2004. Matt created the presentation as a response to many WebWork and Tapestry folks harassing him on his blog.

Now Matt is revamping the presentation for a talk this Thrusday at ApacheCon. He is focusing his talk down to what he considers the top web frameworks in use today.

The change I‘d like to do is to reduce the number of frameworks down to (what I consider) the top web frameworks for deploying to the JVM. What are those frameworks? IMHO, they are as follows, in no particular order:

• GWT-Ext
• Wicket
• Grails
• Flex/OpenLaszlo
• Seam
• Struts 2
  

There are also some interesting comments and responses from Matt, so be sure to check them out. I especially enjoyed his comment to one person who asked why JSF was not on the list.

Matt said:

JSF is represented by Seam. I think they‘ve fixed a lot of JSF‘s issues and tend to promote best practices (Facelets, Ajax4JSF). With the dollars Red Hat is spending to develop and market Seam, it‘s difficult to ignore. While AppFuse‘s JSF version has a lot of the same ingredients, Seam is likely to be much more actively developed because of the dollars behind it.

I loved this answer because every JSF user says that JSF is create when you use Facelets, and it is good to see that seem is using the best parts of JSF.