Developing Web applications with Java, especially applications that need back-end data sources, has normally involved a whole lot of non-Java tasks--including HTML and XML. In the past year I’ve had the good fortune to leave it all behind and create Web applications using only Java.

Before getting too deep into this, let me explain a little about the Web applications that I’ve worked on in the past. I started writing Java Enterprise applications (J2EE) about five years ago. Almost all the work I did up until 2005 involved communications services, especially Web services. J2EE is really nice for this kind of thing and makes Web services a breeze.

Two years ago I was helping one of my clients with Web services, when an emergency pulled me away to help one of my client’s clients implement the services we had created. It turned out that the problem wasn’t the services, but the Web application. I worked on this project for the next nine months, and I learned quite a bit about the limitations of JSP and many other template-based solutions.

Read the rest of the article from Stout Systems Fall 2007 Newsletter.