AppFuse

Ben Fowler points to AppFuse, a quick way to set up J2EE projects with more buzz words than you can shake a stick at.  Specifically it sets up a Tomcat/MySQL apps that:

Uses Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, Cactus, StrutsTestCase, Canoo’s WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts (or Spring MVC)

That’s a huge number of different technologies.  It’s not necessarily bad to use all those technologies together (in fact it’s probably very good) but it’s important to be aware that pragmatic programmers don’t use wizards they don’t understand.

So unless you are already very familiar with how to set up a project using all of those technologies and understand exactly what AppFuse is doing for you, don’t use it.  At some point the code and configuration files that AppFuse sets up are going to become code that’s a part of your project and they will be yours to maintain.  If you don’t understand what they do, how are you going to fix problems that show up or make changes later?

Having said that, for seasoned veterans who understand all of those technologies well, AppFuse should be a big time saver.  I can see a lot of beginners getting into very deep water with it though.