Russell Beattie points out that the fact that you can build all sorts of fancy MVC-based applications in server-side Java doesn’t mean that you have to use that architecture if you prefer not to. You can always do things the PHP way with straight JSP and taglibs if you prefer it (and be just as productive as well). JSTL gets you to an almost ColdFusion-like level of simplicity. However, there’s a darn good reason to use Struts or another MVC framework on your projects — it makes things easier to maintain and expand down the road, and I haven’t worked on many applications that didn’t need to be maintained or expanded at some point.