I was *really* impressed with the Turbo gears 20 minute wiki screencast. (eventually I’ll get around to checking out the Ruby on Rails screencast as well, though I’m sure it kicks a similar magnitude of ass.)
In 20 minutes, the screencaster (Kevin Dangoor) builds a simple wiki using a object-relational mapping library and a templating library, and even throws in some AJAX-like functionality into the client (which works in no time because the data to be displayed is already in a dictionary, ready to be rendered in any format)
Anyone doing development for the web should think twice about bringing the slow, expensive and overly complex J2ee stack to the party. Complexity is not a virtue.
One couldn’t get but a tiny fraction of the amount of work done in 20 minutes with J2EE. So why is the software industry so wedded to the Java train?