[pudakai]

May not be to everyone's taste, but it is at least worth mentioning Spring Roo. There is an integrated eclipse based IDE (STS) available as well.

You can get a nominal Java CRUD app up in short time with this.

I had been out of Java for a number of years, but we wanted to start w/jvm back end. I was surprised at how much of Spring complexity it encapsulates, it has worked quite well for us so far, although we are still very early on in the process.