Simon Brown is doing a series of articles comparing web application frameworks. Good sweep of current goods in this arena. For the moment i'm sticking with springs webapp framework. It's not yet covered in the article tho. Check it out at http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/1.2.x/reference/mvc.html

I'm stubbornly sticking with the XML/XSLT way of doing things. I still think its the best way to decouple presentation layer from the rest of the tier. Hence sticking with the resin application server. Which, aside from its simplicity, offers a pretty decent XML/XSLT transformation engine. I don't know if that still applies up to this day, but it certainly was 2 or was it 3 years ago? when I benchmarked it against other xml/xslt transformator.