Working as a developer in the industry I have met up with a number of Java EE frameworks and technologies -- Struts, Sprint, hibernate, etc. But as I begin to look at things more from a design perspective I begin to wonder what all of the various frameworks are and where they fit into software archetecture.

At the moment I am evaluating various OSGi like environments to see which one might be the best suited to the overall design of my product and I am really feeling woefully uninformed. Is there someplace where information of the various Java based frameworks begins to converge?

If not, Perhaps we can pull our knowledge together and begin to compile such information.

I found this list which covers open source web frameworks (WOW there are way more than I knew about). I was up on maybe, JSF, Struts, Tapestry, Cacoon, Wicket, Spring (which is not really a web framework but ok).

I know QT has some server side java framework API's in their framework?

Well perhaps -- but not a large enough percentage to make it worth while considering QT Jambi to be a Java EE framework. There is the network, SVG, XML packages but really these areas are well covered by other enterprise frameworks that specialize a little better.

Jambi's packages seem to exist to support the desktop framework. That being said -- if I were working on a thick client for an enterprise application I would definitely consider using Qt (well... actually the cost might be prohibitive)

When working with Open Source in the enterprise world you need to keep an eye upon the license agreements.

Technologies are growing so fast, will the older technologies such as struts,jdbc,ejb being totally replaced soon? For the time being the older application that are using strut,jdbc,ejb2 seem to be replace by Spring framework.

In few years time, is it J2EE developer that do not know Spring technologies cannot survive in the industry anymore?

Seem like I trying to bring up the topic of EJB vs Spring.

well I would say that learning Spring is a must. I don't think you will really see the death of EJB or Struts etc. People like different flavors and Spring is only one flavor (plus we will see the Java EE standard pick up more and more of the Spring-like features).

While technologies tend to move quickly, enterprises do not... Most places I go are still struggling to drop all of their Java 1.4 dependencies and move to a Java 1.5/1.6 world -- by the time they do, Java 7 will be out, and 8 will be the current buzz...

While newer technologies might be intriguing they all have a cost -- often it is just more cost-effective for a development team to use the older technologies which are well understood than to venture out into unknown waters to implement a solution using newer technology.

Even migrating to the latest and greatest version of a library often requires a substantial amount of regression testing (especially if customization had to be made to work around bugs in the older code).

So I have learned that while it is good to know what is out there and what trends are -- chances are you will not actually get to play with the latest and greatest very often. Struct/JDBC/EJB will be arround for a while.