Hello, I am J2SE developer but I have rich web-background (php, perl/cgi and so on) and now I am starting new project. It will have web interface, spaghetti business logic, relational database as storage and connections to other services. I do it from the scratch.

My colleagues told me to use spring, spring security and struts. I look briefly at J2EE spec and found that it covers almost all aspects of enterprise application. I asked my colleagues why do they need spring and struts, but looks like they use technologies simply because they are familiar with them and not familiar with classic J2EE stack.

So, my question is: what is bad about J2EE? Why do I need spring if there are JNDI lookups? It will take a day or two to create fake InitialContext for unit-tests. And that is all: I stand with out of external tools like spring. Why do I need spring-security if there is a security built in Servlets spec? I can map any request to any servlet using web.xml, no struts.xml is needed. I can use servlet-filters instead of struts interceptors. There is RMI, so I do not need spring-remote. And so on..

Why should I bother my self with all that fancy stuff if there is J2EE?

I really want to find situation when J2EE is not enough. Do you have any?

Thanks!