DevRates - Open-source frameworks reviews by real users

In comparison to MyFaces/Tomahawk and RichFaces development Primefaces is a major step forward in JSF development: great controls, various options, a vivid community to help out and in combination with Spring Roo a rapid development support that I didn't experience with any Java framework before.

After spending many years with other languages and frameworks, I have come to find that Grails helps me to be more productive.  Often times with increased productivity comes a big hit to stability, scalability and performance.  This is not the case with Grails.  Because it is built on rock solid technologies like Spring, Hibernate and Groovy it is easily able to handle whatever my clients throw...

You'll hear all of my complaints about Backbone.js a lot of places from people who have used it to do large projects. They are: 1) the available examples are all for really simple programs, 2) there are not a lot of "best practices" advocated with the framework itself (for example, where does control logic go on the client side, into a new class you create yourself, into the router...

Camel is one of the best lightweight integration frameworks fo Java. It requires some time to learn how to develop routes, handle errors and so on, but with some experience you can write almost any integration pattern in just few lines of code. Other disadvantages include: some api breaking changes between versions and lack of persistence layer in few pattern implementations. You can use Camel...

Hibernate is the premiere ORM solution for Java, IMHO. A few aspects don't seem to be well thought out, including HQL their database neutral language, I've generally been very happy with it. It integrates with many web app and service frameworks and is reasonably fast. I'd looked at other solutions before, but settled on Hibernate rather quickly due to the active development and large...

jQuery is best javascript toolkit around. Simple and usable even for CSS and HTML noobs (like me...). Ajax, DOM manipulation, animation effects and many more in a readable 1-2 liners of javascript. Impressive number of plugins, unfortunately not all maintained at root jQuery site, which requires a bit of googling. Documentation (as always) could have been better :)

I searched long and hard for a Java-based web framework and settled on Tapestry 5. I'd used Tapestry 4 before, but 5 is far, far better. It's amazingly easy to use and requires no icky XML configuration. Integration with Hibernate and my DAOs was very easy. Updates have been very easy as well, having gone from 5.0.x to 5.3.3 with minimal changes.  What I enjoy most is how little...