JAG - similar to AppFuse, but offers more choices
This afternoon, I stumbled upon the open source Java Application Generator on SourceForge:
JAG is an application that creates complete, working J2EE applications. It is intended to alleviate much of the repetitive work involved in creating such applications, while providing a means of quality assurance that the applications created will be of consistent quality.
Major differences include: JAG has a Swing GUI to create your app and it uses EJB 2.0 for its persistence layer. AppFuse has an Ant task (ant new) and uses Hibernate (or iBATIS) for the persistence layer. Both use Struts 1.1 with Tiles and Validator support. The question is - will they eventually offer Spring, WebWork and Tapestry options for the MVC layer? I doubt it...
BTW, my experience with java.net has been quite nice so far. I like the fact that I can use a pserver for developer CVS access (vs. SSH only at SF). I also like that I can approve e-mails just by replying to an e-mail (vs. using a web interface on SF). The best part, however, has to be that CVS commits and e-mail messages are immediately browse-able in the archives. This is rather convenient when you're a blogger that likes to link to source code and messages in (sudo) real-time.