J2EE technologies: Dead & Alive?

[d000hg]

Spring 2.5.x release uses @Annotations instead of XML config files

I'd come across that and it's pretty cool... but I reckon it would be a rarity to find projects using this so I'm going to brush up on the old way.

Writing servlets for presentation layer is so 1999

You mean like manually doing write("<p>Hello world</p>")... agreed, I've seen that used for error pages or writing non-HTML responses e.g AJAX, but most of what I did was JSP. My question is if all the modern ways still boil down to writing views using JSP, referencing bean objects?

[Joe Bloque]

I'm going to brush up on the old way

IMHO 'old way' is good to understand how a framework like Spring evolved, but existing/new projects are begining to upgrade or are using new version - It helps to 'catch up' to blag in the interview, atleast.

My question is if all the modern ways still boil down to writing views using JSP, referencing bean objects?

That is my understanding. There are new tools like Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that generate JavaScript and call Service POJOs asynchronously. But the underlying request still goes through a Front controller servlet. IMO, all these frameworks/tools won't make sense unless 'under the hood' is understood. Now-a-days It is pretty unusual for JEE projects not to go with some proven framework in Presentation/Integration layers unless there is some compelling reason not to do so.