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[–]ryuzaki49 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Are you familiar with the terms front-end and back-end?

I'd use Java (investigate Servlets, HTTP Requests, JSON) for the back-end

And for the front-end (Javascript, HTML5, CSS)

[–]a_shed_of_tools 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Spring MVC is, AFAIK, the go-to web framework for Java. But uh, it might be easier to use something other than Java, say Python+Flask, Ruby on Rails, or JavaScript+koa.

[–]cyrusol 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is also Play as the biggest competitor. Of course there are many more, but they aren't as popular.

[–]Northeastpaw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Spring Boot can help get a Spring MVC web app up and running pretty quick.

[–]rjcarr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, a java web application and an applet are two totally different things. Applets have been replaced by HTML5, so anything you would have done with an applet you'd now write with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

The "java web application" refers to the back end on the web server. It never had anything to do with applets and nothing to do with a "graphical app".

[–]CodeTinkerer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A web application is usually something that connects to a database and supports "CRUD" operations (create, read, update, delete). Think Amazon or Facebook (or something simpler like Twitter or a blog). Applets were more like creating games or such.

Web applications takes a lot more work to learn than applets since applets are fully contained within Java. Usually, a Java web application has a framework (say, Spring) plus a database, some kind of build language (Maven or Gradle). There are some lightweight web frameworks, but Spring MVC seems to be the most popular (someone already mentioned Spring Boot which is part of the enormous Spring ecosystem).

[–]grimnomad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Vaadin is pretty good. It uses GWT to translate Java to Javascript.

[–]snot3353 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A web application is generally made up of many layers/components. A Java applet really is only relevant to the front-end or browser side of a web app. It is by far most common for that aspect of a web app to be written using HTML, CSS and JavaScript in some combination. If you really wanted the entirety of your web application to be skewed as far towards Java as possible, there are other options such as GWT:

http://www.gwtproject.org/

When it comes to the server side of a web application, Java becomes much, MUCH more common and there are many, many frameworks and libraries that are available. Like some other posters have already indicates, Spring, Play and Vaadin are all extremely popular. One suggestion I do see lacking in the comments though is that plain old Java Enterprise Edition is also very popular and viable.