Quite a few Versions of EJB's were pretty terrible, and early Java Web Technologies had a bit of obsession with XML. However, current Swing is pretty pleasant t

Quite a few Versions of EJB's were pretty terrible, and early Java Web Technologies had a bit of obsession with XML. However, current Swing is pretty pleasant to work with, and I think that most of the Java have stems from early PHP developers. If you had worked with PHP, with database queries and page formatting in one file, all the crazy MVC crap with business objects and and stuff must have seem needlessly complicated. And even if noone does develop like that now (I hope, anyway), the meme that Java is terrible prevails. EDIT: new Java, for example, looks about like this [1] and that's not all that complicated, even though I would like it more with webflow (technology for describing webpage in term of flows -- each flow is basically FSM with method calls specified on transitions and FMS-wide persistent storage). [1]: https://github.com/heroku/devcenter-spring-mvc-hibernate https://github.com/heroku/devcenter-spring-mvc-hibernate