Do you know more than 50 million websites including some most popular ones like Google, LinkedIn, eBay, Amazon, and Stack Overflow are written extensively using which language? the answer is nothing other than the most popular Java. Java just reached its Silver Anniversary but Still Ruling the software industry with ‘Old is Gold’ kinda reliability. The Allrounder Java provides numerous applications for Android, Cloud Computing, Big Data, and Machine Learning projects but when it comes to Web development Java is the best choice for any level of developer.
Frameworks are tools with pre-written code, that act as a template or skeleton, which can be reused to create an application by simply filling with your code as needed which enables developers to program their application with no overhead of creating each line of code again and again from scratch. Now if you are searching for the best tools in the market that help you to develop a website easier, faster and better than Java is always there for you with a large number of frameworks and most importantly most of the Java frameworks are free and open-source. But if you want to learn Java and want to master it then enroll now with GeeksforGeeks Java Programming Foundation – Self-Paced and kick start your programming journey with our expert mentor Sandeep Jain.
1. Spring:
Spring is a powerful, lightweight, and most popular framework which makes Java quicker, easier, and safer to use. This framework is very popular among developers for its speed, simplicity, and productivity which helps to create enterprise-level web applications with complete ease. Spring MVC and Spring Boot made Java modern, reactive, and cloud-ready to build high-performance complex web applications hence used by many tech giants, including Netflix, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.
- Using Spring’s flexible and comprehensive third-party libraries you can build any web application you can imagine.
- Start a new Spring project in seconds, with, fast startup, fast shutdown, and optimized execution by default.
- Spring provides a lightweight container that can be triggered without a web server or application server.
- It provides backward compatibility and easy testability of your project.
- It supports JDBC which improves productivity and reduces error as much as possible
- It supports modularity and both XML and annotation-based configuration
- Spring Boot has a huge ecosystem and community with extensive documentation and multiple Spring tutorials
2. Grails:
It is a dynamic full-stack Java framework based on the MVC design pattern. which is easy to learn and most suitable for beginners. Grails is an object-oriented language that enhances developer productivity. While written in Groovy it can run on the Java platform and is perfectly compatible with Java syntax.
- Easy to Create tags for the View,
- built-in support for RESTful APIs,
- you can mix Groovy and Java using Grails,
- best suitable for Rapid Development,
- configuration features are dynamic, no need to restart the server.
3. Google Web Toolkit (GWT):
It is a very popular open-source Java framework used by a large number of developers around the world for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. This framework is used for the productive development of high-performance complex web applications without being an expert in front-end technologies like JavaScript or responsive design. It converts Java code into JavaScript code which is a remarkable feature of GWT. Popular Google applications like AdSense and AdWords are written and using this framework.
- Google APIs are vastly used in GWT applications.
- Open-source and Developer-friendly.
- Easily create beautiful UIs without vast knowledge in front-end scripting languages.
- Create optimized web applications that are easy to debug.
- Compiles the Java source code into JavaScript files that can run on all major browsers.
4. Struts
It is a very useful framework, an open-source MVC framework for creating modern enterprise-level Java web applications that favor convention over configuration and reduce overall development time. It comes with plugins to support REST, AJAX, and JSON and can be easily integrated with other Java frameworks like Spring and Hibernate.
- Super Flexible and beginner-friendly,
- Reliable, based on MVC design pattern.
- Integration with REST, JSON, and AJAX.
- Creative themes and templates make development tasks faster.
- Extend capabilities for complex development,
- Reduced development time and Effort, makes dev easier and fun.
5. JavaServer Faces (JSF)
It is quite similar to Struts, a free web application developed framework, maintained by Oracle technology which simplifies building user interfaces for Server-side applications by assembling reusable UI components on a page. JSF is a component-based MVC framework that encapsulates various client-side technologies and focuses more on the presentation layer to allow web developers to create UI simply by just drag and dropping.
- Rich libraries and reusable UI components,
- Easy front-end tools to use without too much coding,
- Jsf helps to improve productivity and consistency,
- Enrich the user experience by adding Ajax events for validations and method invocations.
- It provides an API to represent and manage UI components and instead of using Java, JSF uses XML for view handling.
6. Hibernate
A stable, lightweight ORM Java framework that can easily communicate with any database and is more convenient when working with multiple databases. Working with Hibernate is fun using powerful APIs and several useful tools like Mapping Editor, Wizards, and Reverse Engineering. Many big companies including Platform, DAILY HOTEL, IBM, and Dell use Hibernate in their tech stacks,
- Light-weight and easy to scale up, modify, and configure.
- Complex data manipulation with less coding.
- High productivity and portability,
- Used for RDBMS as well as the NoSQL database.
- Awesome Command-line tools and IDE plugins to make your experience pleasant.
7. Play
A unique type of framework that makes it easier to build a web application using Java and follows the approach of convention over configuration. It is based on the stateless, web-friendly, and lightweight architecture, the MVC pattern. It provides minimal resource consumption (CPU & memory) for a highly scalable modern mobile and web application.
- High performance due to asynchronous processing
- Reactive principles improve the productivity of developers,
- Most of the errors are caught during compile time saving a lot of mistakes early in the development life-cycle.
- Easy and quick reload for any changes in the configuration,
- Easy to create simple JAR files.
8. Vaadin
An open-source client-server framework, with an active worldwide community that allows you to create complex and dynamic web applications using pre-designed UI components. Write UI in plain Java without even bothering JS, HTML, and CSS. You can also create layouts with a visual designer instead of HTML. Vaadin provides a server-side architecture that helps developers to create dynamic and interactive interfaces for the web. Using Vaadin access to the DOM directly from the Java virtual machine. The updated components can be combined with other frontend JavaScript technologies such as React and Vue, or even plain JavaScript.
- High developer productivity and fast development;
- Built on the Web Components standards,
- Provides many components, and different listeners,
- Automates client-server communication and routing,
- Has good documentation and an active community.
9. Wicket
Wicket is a very simple Java web framework, with a component-oriented structure where all you need to know, is only Java and HTML with no XMLs or configuration files. Previous experience working with JSP makes working with Wicket, simply a cakewalk. The main feature of Wicket is its POJO model wherein components are simple (Plain Old) Java Objects having OOP features. These components come bundled together as reusable packages so that developers can customize them with images, buttons, forms, links, pages, containers, behaviors, and more.
- light-weight and superfast framework.
- Unit testing is very easy with Wicket.
- Zero XML configuration files,
- No Back-Button problem,
- Easy to create Bookmarkable Projects.
10. Dropwizard
A lightweight Java framework with out-of-the-box support for advanced configurations, lets you complete your application in the fastest way. It is a magical framework with brilliantly integrated libraries like Jetty, Guava, Jersey, Jackson, and Metrics for all the configurations, security, and performance-related tasks. The developer just needs to work on building your business logic without any extra overhead. Any beginner can create high-performance RESTful web applications very easily using Dropwizard.
- Easy to perform rapid prototyping,
- Support open sources and independent libraries,
- Quick Project Bootstrap,
- Easy to set up and beginner-friendly
- Build high-performance, stable, and reliable web applications.
So If you want to develop an amazing and reliable web application then you can use any of these top Java frameworks as these will meet your business requirements and will offer a certain level of flexibility with optimum performance and security. Using the right frameworks makes web development fun So Choose your framework wisely to enjoy all the features that Java provides.