There's no choice anymore - it's got to be Seam. It's the first Java EE framework to really learn from Rails, eliminate the XML through annotations, natively s

There's no choice anymore - it's got to be Seam. It's the first Java EE framework to really learn from Rails, eliminate the XML through annotations, natively support Hibernate as the ORM, and still keep the perf and tooling advantages of static typing, use the application servers for automated, efficient state management, and generally make the vast API resources of the JEE stack available. On the UI side there's a lot of support for JSF components, which is good for someone like me who wants to write the backend and have the UI just work. The Seam code generator makes pretty instant CRUD applications that go a lot further than any of the Rails auto-scaffolding apps. And, if you think Java's too verbose and inelegant - there's no reason not to write much of the application in Scala or Clojure. And besides, it's by Gavin King. Gavin King made Hibernate. I know of no ORM in any other language that approaches its feature set - though SQLAlchemy in Python is moving in that direction, and acknowledges Hibernate as inspiration. Hibernate used to be a maintenance nightmare because of the XML; the new annotation based version keeps the power but is a lot more DRY. The Java community really did a remarkable job of killing off the XML bloat in the current Java EE stack - and only within the last year or so. [if anyone out there is as enthusiastic about Seam as I am, I have budget for several freelancer projects using it, some of which are actually not boring, and may evolve into startups - contact me on here]