[tristanperry]

A very good article; well written and explained.

For Java web development, it is worth re-considering Spring Boot though * (http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/)

Spring MVC and Data (et al) powered entirely by annotations, and (e.g.) Thymeleaf for templating, can lead to some fairly powerful yet concise apps.

We just started using this where I work, and it's a great step forward compared to old style, XML driven Spring MVC and Hibernate.

Also Spring Boot does bring quite a lot of support for REST, via RestTemplate/RestOperations, along with support for consuming and producing JSON and/or XML at the controller levels.

* Edit: I say re-considering since the article only briefly mentions it.

[smoyer]

Full JavaEE development is pretty analogous - POJOs and annotations. I almost gave up on enterprise Java when every EJB required multiple classes, interfaces and often XML configuration too.

Modern JavaEE isn't nearly as heavy as the article seems to think ... but I can't argue with the article's underlying pragmatism. Use the simplest set of tools that accomplish the task!