AppFuse – To get a J2EE project going…

An interesting article on java.net on AppFuse: AppFuse: Start Your J2EE Web Apps by Matt Raible. AppFuse tries to make it as simple as possible to build, test, and deploy your J2EE Web application. It virtually eliminates setup and configuration, which are often the hard parts. Tools like Ant, JUnit, XDoclet, Hibernate, and Spring can be difficult to get started with. Furthermore, features like authentication, password hints, “remember me,” user registration, and user management are things that most web apps need. AppFuse ships with tutorials for developing DAOs, business delegates, Struts actions (or Spring controllers), integrating tiles and validation, and uses an Ant-based XDoclet task (written by Erik Hatcher) to generate master/detail JSPs from model objects. It uses slick open source tag libraries like Struts Menu (for navigation) and the Display Tag (for paging and sorting lists).
I have not really looked into AppFuse (or its apparent counterparts Java Application Generator and Megg) but it certainly seems worthwhile to do so. There may be some overlap with JHeadstart; perhaps we can learn from AppFuse to improve JHeadstart – or maybe it’s just the competition. Interesting is Matt’s focus on Hibernate (in line with our own strategy) and Spring (still somewhat new to us). I will order Rod Johnson’s book without further ado….