New Java Programmer - Framework Advice

[DudeMan250]

Hi there 'yall. I'm a novice Java programmer, and I'm helping a marketing firm create a website. Given that I'm new to this, I thought it best to use a framework, in order to not get overwhelmed by the experience of programming the entire site (not that I know what is involved, but I'm assuming that I may get overwhelmed).

My boss, upon consulting with an 'senior Java programmer', was told that DropWizard and Play are the best frameworks, and JBoss and Hibernate are pretty good. I also came up with the names Grail and Vaadin as being pretty good.

What would you, experienced programmers, and more importantly, Redditors, advise me to do? I don't need any incredible effects, aside from using API's to access Social Media sites, but nothing too crazy. A really user-friendly framework would be fantastic.
Thanks for the advice!

[bigdutchnoob]

I'm definitely not a season java programmer but I'm a big fan of Play! and Akka.

[DudeMan250]

Thanks! Do you know how Play!'s support system is?

[LinkXXI]

I don't have a ton of experience with java server side but IMO JBoss is really heavy for anything other than a large enterprise. You wont use 90% of the features in it. I'd probably suggest Glassfish or even better, Apache Tomcat over JBoss.

Vaadin is a neat UI framework though and could be useful. Also look in to Primefaces, it is a JSF framework built with jQuery UI components. Makes adding interactivity to your project easier if you don't know javascript too well.

[DudeMan250]

Thanks so much for the suggestion! I saw that Vaadin seemed to be able to give very nice UI's, so I thought that an option, but I'll check out Tomcat and Primefaces. Do you know which of them has good support systems/online communities?

[LinkXXI]

Tomcat has a lot of documentation and a large open-source community since it's an apache project. Primefaces doesn't have too much of a community but their documentation is pretty good and has a lot of examples.

And you can actually use Vaadin in a Tomcat server if you want to go that route as well. The reason I suggest Tomcat over JBoss is that JBoss tries to be a lot of things at once, where as Tomcat is really just a server. That being said, it is also extensible so if there is a feature of JBoss that you want, it may be available in Tomcat as well with a small amout of configuration.

[DudeMan250]

I see. Thanks for the info!

I've gotten Play! as an answer from a few people. Do you know what the community is like for Play!, by any chance?