I just received the new issue of JDJ in the mail and the article that almost immediately caught my attention was JSF: The Ulitmate in Flexibility? Or Complexity by Steve Benfield. Benfield's article expressed my own frustration with J2EE. The basic question is, why is J2EE so complex? Starting with JSP and Sun's apparent desire to create a Java technology just like Microsoft's ASP, J2EE has gone in the direction of creating such an incredible amount of flexibility that even doing the simplest things becomes difficult. At some point someone needs to shout that the Emperor has no clothes. JSF reminds me more of ASP.NET than it does anthing I want to work with. Why can't someone at Sun concentrate on what real developers doing real applications really need? Why can't we have a way to create web applications that is clean and simple? Why is that we need to look outside of J2EE to frameworks like Struts and Velocity to find even a hint of simplification?