I thought that OWL (at least the Pascal version) was pretty reasonable for what it did.
I can understand the frustration with Java, though. The first time I started reading through "web.xml", I thought it was a bit much. Then I read the EJB specs...
Struts, at least the older versions I've had to maintain, is a nightmare. RoR seemed to have a lot less BS to do the same thing.
Since then I have used:
- Turbo Vision - C++ as well
- Object Windows Library in Turbo Pascal and C++
- Microsoft Foundation Classes in C++
- An in-house framework done in TCL and C
- An in-house framework done in C
- An in-house framework done in a mixture of Perl, C++ and CORBA
- J2EE in Java
- An in-house framework in Java for web development
- ... (lost count of all remaining ones)
The desire for frameworks is something that runs deep with enterprise architects.
How many corporations tend to have architects that take a nice framework and always have to put their own layer on top of it as well.