recommendation for choosing a new web development stack

Question

I work in a medium to small team ( 10 people ) developing and supporting several web enterprise applications.

We have a dozen of them built with a house-made framework with asp-classic working against ms-sql server.

We are evaluating the migration to a new development stack.

We'd like it to be open (free) and simple.

I've been looking around the java web frameworks, but all of them seem to be extremely overbloated for our needs (with the possible exception of http://www.playframework.org/, which I couldn't study yet...)

We are thinking about porting our own framework to this new stack, rather than adopting a whole new stack that we are unaware of ...

so far now, we though about the following possibilities

• plain java - jsp - jsf

• groovy - gsp (no grails at all)

• jruby (no rails at all)

we feel really comfortable working with dynamic languages (well, as dynamic as classic asp can be) and with a lean and understandable framework...

I see no small and simple web frameworks for java, like there are for php or ruby...

I really like groovy, but I see no web implementations outside of grails... Besides the language documentation doesn't seem to be quite complete (I might be looking in the wrong place, perhaps)

php could be an option, but I think it would be hard to advocate for it in my current work...

any other option, advice, pros and cons?

thanks a lot

-- edit

some related link Can anyone recommend a simple Java web-app framework?

Answer 1

I'd suggest you take another look at Grails. It does use hibernate and spring under the covers, but for most situations, you don't need to know the details of those frameworks. There's a large community and lots of documentation/blogs/mailing lists for support, as well as a thriving plugin community with over 300 plugins solving pretty much any need.

If you're still put off by grails, you could look into the play framework. I don't have any experience with it, but there has been some traffic recently around it on hacker news and the like. I know it uses groovy for the templating language.