I’m always looking for ways to streamline Java web app development. In case I haven’t spread the word to you, here’s the current set of technologies I’m liking:

• Tapestry 5 – This is the framework I’m using, but I’m not saying it’s better than anything in particular, but I like some of the stuff they are doing.
• Hibernate with annotations – I’ve been a big fan of hibernate for a long time, using the annotations seems to simplify the mapping process quite a bit.
• Spring Hibernate integration – makes transaction/error handling way way easier in Hibernate. I am using HibernateDaoSupport as a base class. Tapestry 5 also has Spring integration, allowing you to inject the DAO’s right into your page classes
• Maven 2 – So much easier than ant and dependency hell, once you get used to the paradigm shift. It might cause issues with your Eclipse tomcat integration, but I always found that to be flaky anyway. Use Jetty instead.
• Maven Jetty plugin – Allows you to build/deploy your app with one command (mvn clean jetty:run). Much easier than dealing with some of the flakiness of tomcat deployment, and allows you to just run one of your apps at a time.

I am also looking into Spring Security, and hoping it will simplify authorization, and I’m doing some IDE evaluations to see if it’s time to ditch Eclipse.