Matt Raible has released AppFuse 1.4, an application for bootstrapping a web application. This latest release includes support for Spring, "Remember Me" built-in, iBATIS as a persistence option (as well as Hibernate). This would be a good project to checkout if you want to see how you would develop an application with Struts -> Spring -> Hibernate (and more).

Links:

AppFuse 1.4 Release Notes

Download AppFuse

AppFuse Wiki Home

It would be great if they merge appfuse with maven's genapp plugin. The maven genapp plugin provides a template applications that are "maven"ized already and ready to build.

Although the current release only has the standard hello world app, it already has more complicated ones such as a webapp and an EJB project in the CVS. (I've written them myself http://jira.codehaus.org/ViewIssue.jspa?key=MPGENAPP-6, though they still need work). I am currently trying to get a full Enterprise app working with Maven (easy) with cactus test cases (still have a problem with this) right now.

Having AppFuse's code in maven:genapp would increase both Maven's and AppFuse's visibility to the community.

"Please download the J2EE SDK and set your J2EE_HOME."
"Please copy junit.jar into ${env.ANT_HOME}/lib"
"taskdef class org.apache.catalina.ant.ReloadTask cannot be found" ???
...

Talk about demanding build scripts... :P

I think, the problem with such project bootstrapping applications is that they are specific enough to dictate a structure of a project source line. As such, the created source line stays foreign and un-understood by an engineering team for long time, if not forever. As a result, instead of making things easier, such tools decrease productivity.

The rest of review and suggestions is here.

Regards,

Slava Imeshev