Have you looked at JEE6 ? They've really pared down a lot of the boilerplate you had to do, and the reference implementation Glassfish is a snappy customer. OR

Have you looked at JEE6 ? They've really pared down a lot of the boilerplate you had to do, and the reference implementation Glassfish is a snappy customer. ORMs, i feel, are a misguided adventure, and Java on the desktop (eg IDEs) are a really easy target. That said, a faster disk and gobs of memory make IDEs really fly.