There are languages on the JVM as well with far less boilerplate, that still give you static typing, performance that is compatible with Java, and the whole ecosystem.
Plus they tend to avoid all the excessive XML tooling and configuration that goes along with J2EE. Compared to nearly any other templating system, JSP is one of the most tedious I've encountered and try to avoid. I had the displeasure of using it a while ago with Struts for a project at my University and hope it will be the last time I ever have to use it.
I assume it stems from Coldfusion and it being popular around the time of the rise of Java, but to continue that tradition nearly 20 years later of XML templating/configuring everywhere just deters professional developers of nearly any other language.
There are some non J2EE Java frameworks that try to remedy the faults of J2EE, but it's kind of given Java on the web a bad rap.
J2EE was last released 10 years ago. Since then its been JEE and with the latest you should not have to use XML for configuration only when you want some really odd config instead of going by convention.
JSF2/Facelets replaced JSP in the most recent JEE standards and is much nicer to work with.
I mean JEE 1.6 was released 4 years ago (around the time of Rails 2.0). For a standard that is not bad.
We actually use a lot of apache wicket which is a very nice framework for website/applications.
Interesting. Thanks for the info and I'm glad to see things have changed for the better. I'll have to search around when I have some free time for more details.
I find most of it ugly. But I'm looking forward to Kotlin. I believe Kotlin is what most of us had hoped Scala would be when it first came out, before it turned into the unholy Java-Haskell-Lisp-C++-Javascript hybrid that it is today.
For instance, Scala and Kotlin.