It appears you haven't really done enterprise Java for a long time. For a start, J2EE is history, anything using J2EE is a legacy project. JEE6 is the latest J

It appears you haven't really done enterprise Java for a long time. For a start, J2EE is history, anything using J2EE is a legacy project. JEE6 is the latest Java Enterprise Spec and it's fairly lightweight, you have to use almost zero xml configuration (everything is annotations) and you and you can turn a plain old java object into a bean with just one annotation (@Stateless) and you can even inject beans anywhere with just one annotation. The same is true for the newer versions of Spring, pretty much no XML config required anymore. I use JEE6 and Spring, these are as powerful as ever but with less and less actual implementation nightmares with every release. They have looked at the other frameworks and stolen all the best ideas in their latest form. Play! for java is also a great framework although it doesn't have much adoption by anyone I care about.