Java Servlet: structuring a legacy webapp. What framework or technology?

Question

I'm developing a Web app (unfortunately a legacy one) in java (that runs on tomcat) with a very small, but not well organized (at least on this particular project), group and let me start by saying we have not much of experience in servlets programming.

The issue is the folloing.

I'm having kind of a trouble as the amount of servlets keep growing and growing while we implement new functions in this webapp. We don't have a project to follow and structure. Just the clint who randomly asks for new functionality out of the blue.

I would just say our web.xml is a mess. I think we should avoid to pollute the web.xml so much with new servlet every time (right now is about 800 lines and it's becoming hard to maintain), but i'm not sure about what i should do about it.

I'm exploring different possibilities, but we can't afford to explore too much so i would like to hear some idea or best practies from people with more experience than us.

I was thinking that maybe we should use CORBA ore something like that to implenet some kind of RPC. So while grouping common functionalities in a few bunch of servlets we could tame the chaos. Could it be a good idea?

What i have in mind is something like a few servlets that pose as entry points for the requests. I would like to group them by the type of response they give. So for example i have a servlet that serves me json after calling some other class that actually do the job to extract data ore manipulating data. Or again i would have a servlet that serves me files, files that another class or servlet produce. And so on. Am i looking at the problem in the right way?

I took a looked at some framework like DWR (Direct Web Remoting) but we would need to integrate it with a legacy webapp with ugly jsp pages full of scriptlet and we can't afford to jump into full ajax web pages in the limited time we have for the project. We would need something more lightweight.

The more i search for a solution the more i get confused and overwelmed by the possibilities i find (REST, ORB, RPC, JSON-RPC...), so i ask for your help. Thanks in advance for every answers and tips.

Answer 1

You should definitely look into the Spring framework which is the de-facto standard for Java web development nowadays: http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework/

The Play Framework is also an interesting framework, giving you a Ruby-like development cycle: https://www.playframework.com/

Answer 2

Hello many of your points are valid so you can use new frameworks like spring or struts but it needs huge change over as many new levels will get added/introduced.But if you want to just get ride of many servlets you can/should use MVC architecture like framework in addition to that use a central level controller(a main servlet)-this will just take the request and checks in it (like switch case) as soon as switch case matched that helper class / utility class should called via instance or statically after that the response should also from that helper/utility class and should be sent to the main controller and that main controller will send it to respective jsps/html.