I'm working on an internal project that involves adding Atom Publishing Protocol support to a data store. Naturally, I'm using Jersey for the HTTP side of things and decided to give Apache Abdera a try for simplifying working with feeds and entries.
Very neat. Maybe I should start spending some time on Java again.
I think the state of Java for the web is getting a lot better, in part as a result of the popularity of Rails. People tend to ask themselves and framework developers why on earth they need all that boilerplate code. Many frameworks are quite nice, at least if you aggressively reject obviously enterprisey things like acegi-security.
There is still a lot of old cruft making you want to cry, but as I said, it’s getting better.