Actually, you can code very nice lightweight apps using an embedded servlet container like Jetty, a JSP library, and an ORM (MyBatis or Hibernate). Which is kin

Actually, you can code very nice lightweight apps using an embedded servlet container like Jetty, a JSP library, and an ORM (MyBatis or Hibernate). Which is kind of like the idea of a microframework. I've used it for a demo I've made (some NLP stuff in Java that needed a web frontend, but where running it under Tomcat would have been like the tail wagging the dog) and it worked quite well. I guess that all the people who want a microframework to get small things done efficiently have moved away from Java at this point, appalled by the whole J2EE circus. And once you have something as elaborate as the J2EE stack as it's meant to be, JSPs are not a good fit, because they don't enforce a separation between presentation and business logic.