How come no one is making these things for Java? Do people just use Ant to do the same thing?
I say this as a disheartened Java programmer. I've recently been involved in a Rails project and a couple of Django projects, and then jumped back into Java. The difference in energy is amazing. Who would make something like this for Java? What would its success path be? Acceptance into an Apache incubator and then into "Commons?" Spec JSR-123987 finally being accepted by Sun/Oracle five years after its written?
I know this isn't a new revelation and I'm far from the first person to bemoan the stale, slow death of Java - but I'm sitting at an airport terminal with nothing better to do, and it's raining out, I'm depressed, and probably shouldn't be posting to HN. :)
I agree that most of the Java web bits (including pretty much all the popular web frameworks) are, for lack of a better term, enterprisey crap. It saddens me a bit that GWT isn't more popular - there's a lot of innovation and power there that gets ignored simply because the framework's written in Java. IMHO, Rails and Django et al are just kind of standard web MVC frameworks that happen to be implemented on fun-to-write languages: the only thing out there that has the real "right" approach to web _application_ dev is GWT, which is fundamentally difference from all the rest (per the Google Maps/Wave team, Wave would not have been possible without GWT).
The most "fun" Java web development framework, IMHO, is Stripes. I think what sets it apart is the lack of enterprisey crap - it's simplicity is refreshing, but it's still powerful enough to be useful.
It's true that Java has become utterly unfashionable. Unfortunately the popular replacements are very much limited by the fact that they are hundereds of times slower and force you into a multi process design in order to use multiple CPUs.
I've been trying really hard to replace Java in some projects and it's been really difficult, so I guess Java has got to have some quality beyond fashion. If you look for libraries that are well maintained, do non-trivial stuff that you don't want to do yourself, are fast, reasonably complete and up-to-date on Unix and Windows, you will find that 98% of them are written in Java or C.