I have been part of building a web startup using Java technologies. Our stack was -
1. Apache + Jetty
2. Java
3. GWT
4. Rules engine (drools)
5. Solr/Lucene for searching
6. Mysql (InnoDB)
7. Amazon web services (EC2, S3)
Experience was good.
I generally try staying away from frameworks like Struts, JSF for a consumer facing web app. They make sense in enterprise domain, but not so much in web.
I am right now building a product on my own using GWT (Java to JS cross compiler), Scala and Mongodb as my stack. Experience is again pretty good.
On the backend I chose Scala over Java mainly because I require lot of parallel processing to crunch data.
Experience was good. I generally try staying away from frameworks like Struts, JSF for a consumer facing web app. They make sense in enterprise domain, but not so much in web.
I am right now building a product on my own using GWT (Java to JS cross compiler), Scala and Mongodb as my stack. Experience is again pretty good.
On the backend I chose Scala over Java mainly because I require lot of parallel processing to crunch data.